Re: Switching to the OSL License, in a dual way.

["Leandro Guimarães Faria Corsetti Dutra" <lgcdutra@terra.com.br>]

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003 08:42:30 +0000, Dean McEwan wrote:

>  After recently reading Mr. Stallman's online *BLURB* at
> www.stallman.org, specifically the diary entry on June 28th 2003, I
> am disturbed

	Yes, that entry is disgusting.  Furthermore, I think one can
has good philosophical reasons to totally reject these views.  But I
have to praise RMS for keeping them fairly separate of his FSF & GNU
work, to the point of using a separate domain.  Many other activists
don't do the same, mixing free software with antiglobalisation and
other divisive opinions.


> I would like to work on helping you people move to a OSL licence,
> work out copyright owners and add the OSL option to each individual
> file one by one.

	I fail to see the connection between licensing and RMS'
personal political opinions.  Or do you suggest a Thought Police
should be nominated to investigate ESR opinions before accepting the
OSL?  I fear it won't be much better... perhaps they might not offend
you but sure will offend other people.


> I am willing to pay to track down unfindable people.

	This is a worthy goal.


> This license does not lose you any additional freedoms, in fact it
> is more legally secure so it gains you legal security

	What do you mean?  As I understand it OPL has no specific
advantages over the GNU GPL apart from dissociation from the GNU
Project.  All I heard up to now were subjective stuff like "it's
simpler", "I can understand it" or "more strict lawyerspeak", all of
which seems contracditory to me.  I am still awaiting a good
comparision and a case for it.  Google helped me nothing here.

	On the other hand the real soft belly of the kernel as I
understand it is the lack of copyright assignments.  Assuming you can
track all copyright owners, which I doubt one possibly can now,
getting the agreement from all of them would be roughly the same as
having their assignments, without the same juridical safety effect.
And you may open a Pandora box, as I haven't seen any thourough study
on the possible effects of adding or substituting OSL for the GNU GPL.


> as well as the traditional GNU freedoms which RMS is jeopordising
> with a disgusting set of *IDEALS*.

	Can you be more specific?

	How can one have freedom without ideals?  This looks like just
another road to serfdom to me... see where anglo-saxon pragmatism has
lead us: WIPO, DMCA, eternal copyrights...


> One of 4 members of the board of DM. TECH.

	What's DM TECH?


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