BSD, Gav, LGPL, Jeremy, and business

[Patrik Stridvall]

> Patrik Stridvall <ps at leissner.se> wrote:
> 
> > > WINE should rise above this agenda and not become an
> > > agent of it.
> > What agenda?
> > 
> > The GPL/LGPL works in ways that are almost the dual to fair use.
> > Very simplified: It uses copyright to extend fair use.
> 
> No.  If anything, it seems to be using licencing rules 
> to negate copyrights.  It really wants to make a copyright
> into "a right to copy it".  Even taking what you say, if you
> extend what is "fair" use, you obviously must be making it
> less fair somewhere else....

As I said, very simplified.

What I meant is that the mechanism that forces release of
the extension of the LGPL (read: copyleft) is similar to the
case where fair use is extended so I take legally take
the work instead.

Of course fair use requires the use of "pull" which
my be of less use if the work is compiled into a binary.

The copyleft mechanism forces "push" of the source code
which is better in the case of software.

I observed that there are some theoretical similarites
between fair use and copyleft. So seeing copyleft as some
sort of contracted or licensed fair use makes sense.

This suggest that a too broad fair use have similar problem that
a too broad application of copyleft.

And indeed both have the freeloader problem for example.

I by this wanted to illustrate that copyleft is not something
inherantly "evil" as Brett Glass are apparently crusading against.

Like the case for fair use a little copyleft is good as long as
you don't get to much.