Re: [off topic] Re: Licensing issues

[terry@albert.animats.net]

On 20 Sep, Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote:

> With wider community considers the tux.org as an official distro, and
> you and I cannot take that, change it, and redistribute it as tux.org
> Linux.  We can, of course, the licence allows it, but it would be
> foolish to do so.

Not so foolish, and I'll go so far as to predict that it will occur in
a significant way within the next twelve months or so. Anybody can
influence the official kernel development direction by becoming part of
the "inner circle" .. if you or I don't have the skill/ideas to be there
then it is probably good that we aren't. None of this is a rights issue
though.

> Right now, the LDP is the raw material from which all the publishers
> are excavating ore, refining and coallating it, indexing and organizing
> it, and then selling it solely for the benefit of the authors and the
> publisher --- the information they list is not their invention, and
> although the authors are doing considerable work to sift the broken and
> outdated from the gems, I would be a lot happier if the end result was
> folded back to improve the LDP in some way; right now, and I include all
> of the publishers, we're being stripmined and outstripped.

At least one publisher is doing precisely what you'd hope, filtering
their stuff back into the OpenSource work and has been since day one.

I will personally oppose any attempt to have LDP works published under
any sort of exclusive contract. I'd sooner see the LDP materials
un-published in paper form (which won't happen, there will be people
that will publish them) than have the LDP compromise on the issue of
freedom.

Stallman didn't get the GNU project kicking along by being compromising
on licensing freedom.

Terry

-- 
terry@albert.animats.net, terry@linux.org.au



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