On Sun, 2009-06-21 at 18:33 -0400, Duane Ellis wrote: > zach> I am afraid that your intent will not matter even one iota, in a > court of law. > > This is not, and was not ever my intent, I am speaking of what I see as > the original authors "GPL+[undocumented]-exception" intention. > > zach> If you want to make exceptions, then they do not apply to the new > code. You cannot retroactively change the license; > > The code was *Domenic's* to license in that way, as he was the original > author. > > I am not changing anything, I am only stating what I see as the history > of the project, things that happened +3 years before I was involved. > > I don't like it, you obviously do not, and I believe others equally do > not like it. > > I would like to see this exception *documented* so that it does not > expand, or continue beyond this exact situation. > > Then we can move on.
I claim that there never was an exception to the GPL, if it was not documented as part of the public SVN tree. If the original authors allowed the distributors to produce binaries with this functionality, that appears to involve separate legal licensing agreements from the distribution of GPL binaries. Again, I have no interest in looking back at past "violations", because this kind of tacit understanding with the original author -- and because I have no claim and do not really care. That said, the present situation remains the same. The license cannot be changed retroactively on the current trunk, no matter what Dominic's intent might be; such changes could only be applied to the revisions of agreeing contributors. If we had a list of all contributors that would allow such an exception, we could determine the earliest possible revision that may be exempted. Do we really want to go down that road? This issue has already balloon beyond control; today, I received what can only be described as "hate mail" for defending my position. I would prefer this be settled now by other contributors defend my interpretation of the situation. I will not be intimidated into backing down on this issue. Others are welcome to send me private e-mail to call me a "nazi" and otherwise debase my contributions to the project with profanity, but I would prefer to be convinced through a more articulate debate on this list. Cheers, Zach _______________________________________________ Openocd-development mailing list Openocd-development@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/openocd-development
