On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Joey Hess wrote: > Don Armstrong wrote: > > The bright line is actually pretty straight forward: Do you modify the > > file with syntactic whitespace or the file without? Is it preferable > > to modify the file without the keyword expansion or with? > > Preferable by whom?
The upstream maintainer. Whatever form(s) of the work the upstream maintainer actually uses to modify the work is the prefered form for modification. > It's very dangerous to take a stance that any code that someone > claims has a different preferred form for modification is > nondistributable under the GPL. This allows anyone slander upstream > and get their code considered unusable. It doesn't matter what anyone thinks or claims is the prefered form for modification, all that maters is what _is_. I'm (conveniently) ignoring the issue of determining what is actually the prefered form for modification for upstream, becuase it's something that is necessarily heuristic, and not really the domain of -legal to determine. > It allows upstreams to lie about their development practives and > damage us by forcing us to drop their entrenched code. Unfortunatly, there's not much that can be done to protect us from this latter case. If upstream wants to lie about which is the prefered form for modification, our choice is either to stop distributing or pony up when they sue us for violating their license and prove that they're lying. [But again, this is about determining which form is the prefered form for modification, not about what we do once we know what that is.] Don Armstrong -- We were at a chinese resturant. He was yelling at the waitress because there was a typo in his fortune cookie. -- hugh macleod http://www.gapingvoid.com/batch31.php http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
