Hi Erich and Debian Folks,
I had dinner with Pamela Samuelson (Cyberlaw instructor at Berkeley) and
Mitchell Baker (Attorney and head of Mozilla) this evening. We discussed
the dpkg + get_it issue and various examples of derivation without
conventional copying of one work directly into another. Their (highly
unofficial) call was "nobody knows". I strongly doubt that any of us are
interested in clearing up the law with a test case :-) .
If you ever are in a position to influence Troll Tech, the GPL as an option
to their present QPL 1.0 license would be nice. Caldera managed to get them
to move to QPL 1.0 from their previous (much worse) license as one of the
terms of contract work that Troll was doing for Caldera, so this is not that
unlikely. I don't see that they have anything to lose from allowing the GPL.
Yes, there are ambiguities in the GPL. What's worse is that they are matched
by ambiguities in copyright law, because copyright law pre-dates software and
very few software concepts have been incorporated into it to date.
Thanks
Bruce
