On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 05:37:15PM -0600, Joel Baker wrote: > > How about we find any software that still has the advertising clause and > > aim to chuck it out of the archive? It can't be that difficult by now. > > Ah, thank you, Mr. Suffield, for the typical extremism. I reply, as I did > in the first message: "How about we chunk out any software that still has > potential patent problems?"
That's entirely different. This isn't a "potential" problem, it's a clear and very real one. We also reject software which has real patent problems. All software has potential patent problems, so rejecting any such software would leave the archives empty. This is nonsensical. Likewise, all software has potential copyright problems. However, the filing of a patent with the USPTO does not a real problem, since that just means the paperwork was correctly filed - it doesn't signify a valid patent. Patent validity, like copyright, can only be properly determined in a court of law - but we can make fairly accurate predictions of what the result would be in most cases. In those cases where we cannot, we assume the worst, both for practical and ideological reasons. > however, we can't even decide to yank the GFDL > stuff out of the archive, Nonsense. > Why on earth does it seem reasonable to yank 4-clause BSD stuff when we > have an extremely high success rate at converting it, and the bulk of the > work (inspecting licenses) is the same, with a fairly small incremental > (contacting upstream)? Am I correct in understanding that your argument is "Many projects which have been licensed under the 4-clause BSD license are now licensed under the 3-clause BSD license instead, and therefore the 4-clause BSD license is acceptable" ? This argument doesn't make any sense. Obviously things which are now licensed under the 3-clause BSD license are not a problem. Since, as you say, in almost every case projects using the 4-clause BSD license are easily convinced to convert, it should be fairly obvious that those remaining are *not* going to be so easy? If you can persuade the upstream author to relicense 4-clause BSD software under the 3-clause version, then obviously it is no longer licensed under the 4-clause version, and therefore would not need to be removed. If you can't, then your argument is irrelevant. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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