BSD, Gav, LGPL, Jeremy, and business
Patrik Stridvall
ps at leissner.se
Sat Feb 16 14:39:40 CST 2002
> 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.
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