Re: For Approval: BSD License, PostgreSQL Variant

On Oct 11, 2007, at 6:07 PM, dlw wrote:
> The GPL purports to bind "all third parties"
to the terms of the  
> GPL license. Unfortunately the Supreme Court of the
United States  
> in 2002 reaffirmed a fundamental principle of contract
law  
> prohibiting the parties to a contract from binding
nonparties. See  
> EEOC v. Waffle House, Inc./, 534 U.S. 279, 294 (2002)
(“It goes  
> without saying that a contract cannot bind a
nonparty.”).

DLW, you show a remarkable facility for misinterpreting
simple  
situations and then finding citations which refute the
strawman  
position you've invented.  To address this confusion simply,
the GPL  
does not purport to bind all third parties.  In the initial
clause,  
it says "Activities other than copying, distribution
and modification  
are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope.
 The act  
of running the Program is not restricted...."

The GPL applies to people who copy, (re)distribute, and/or
modify  
(aka creative derivative works) something which is licensed
under the  
GPL.  Someone who does none of these things is not bound by
the GPL.

-- 
-Chuck

On 10/12/07, Chuck Swiger <chuckcodefab.com> wrote:
[...]
> it says "Activities other than copying,
distribution and modification
> are not covered by this License; they are outside its
scope.  The act
> of running the Program is not restricted...."

Until you buy RHL. They restrict it quite thoroughly: pay up
per
"installed image" you run or else...

>
> The GPL applies to people who copy, (re)distribute,
and/or modify
> (aka creative derivative works) something which is
licensed under the
> GPL.  Someone who does none of these things is not
bound by the GPL.

To quote Lee Hollaar (who worked on Internet, copyright, and
patent
issues as a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Fellow):

-----
One can tie oneself in knots trying to make sense of the GPL
and
the statements made about it.  It ignores provisions of the
copyright
statutes that allow the modification or redistribution of
works
without permission of the copyright owner.  It talks about
"derived"
works which don't seem to be the same as "derivative
works."  And
the explanations from RMS and others often make little
sense, as
in the case where something was a derived work until
somebody wrote
a non-GPLed math library compatible with the GPLed one.
-----

regards,
alexander.

--
"PJ points out that lawyers seem to have difficulty
understanding the
GPL. My main concern with GPLv3 is that - unlike v2 -
non-lawyers can't
understand it either."
                           -- Anonymous Groklaw Visitor