[ILUG] In other news

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Niall Walsh (linux at esatclear.ie):

[CDDL:]

> Checking the debian legal lists it seems it may be DFSG compliant...

In a better world, it _would_ be possible to consult debian-legal (or the
various related "summary" Web pages) to reliably determine whether a
licence is DFSG-compliant.  That fictional alternate debian-legal
wouldn't be populated by context-challenged monomaniacs woefully
ignorant of applicable law.  

Ah well.

Suffice it to say that I draw a distinction between the concepts of 
"DFSG compliant" and "approved by certain net.random wankers posting to
a rather painful-to-read public mailing list".  That having been said:

> http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/12/msg00004.html
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/01/msg00952.html

The "patents" comments are tautologically true -- but would be so
_regardless_ of licence.  That is, _any_ codebase adversely encumbered
by patents is non-free/proprietary, irrespective of what licence
provisions would otherwise apply.

That other bit about fixed attributions making a work
non-free/proprietary is one reason why, although I'm a long-time
subscriber to debian-legal, I only rarely read it, in order to safeguard
my blood pressure:  Author attributions may not be stripped in
derivative works by _default action of copyright law_, so it is utter
lunacy to assert, as poster Garrett and numerous others do, that clauses
to that same effect make the work non-free through it "failing the
Chinese Dissident Test".

That is a perfect example of the aforementioned problem of certain
posters being context-challenged and ignorant of the law.

[Freely redistributable SUSE Linux Professional Edition:]

> So easy and useful that nobody has done it or mentioned it since the 
> last time we mentioned it, but in the meantime the pope has died, a 
> german pope has been elected, Apple has announced it's going to Intel 
> Processors and Sarge has been released :-)   Something makes me think 
> the people who use Novell/Suse just aren't the people to do the job (not 
> meaning they can't but they don't) and so we'll probably see another 
> pope at least before this happens!

I suspect those users who would otherwise have been sufficiently
motivated to take on that coding/maintenance chore have simply found it
much easier to move to some other distribution (CentOS, Debian/Ubuntu,
Libranet, Mandriva, etc.).  Professional Edition is very nice, but
hardly the only game in town.

-- 
Cheers,             We write precisely            We say exactly
Rick Moen           Since such is our habit in    How to do a thing or how
rick at linuxmafia.com Talking to machines;          Every detail works.
Excerpt from Prof. Touretzky's decss-haiku.txt @ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/