Fedora Freedom and linux-libre

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 02:24:30PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> Under copyright law, a collective work is a work in which a number of
> contributions, each constituting separate and independent works in
> themselves, are assembled into a collective whole.

Yes I know that. I'm curious why you think the two independent works are
somehow a collective work.

> work itself. That includes the permission, or refusal of permission, to
> include that GPL'd work within a collective work.

The GPL says:

"In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program
with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of
a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under
the scope of this License."

Last time I checked both disk and RAM are storage media and the two works
appear to be independent.

I can't find a rational way to interpret it otherwise. We get into the world
of 'f the program is GPL then the icons are GPL because they are connected
with it. Or games where you'd argue the music files magically become GPL

Take the cases you think are a collective/derivative and the cases you think are
not and define a test by which this can be ascertained, then perhaps I can
see what you are trying to argue.. 

> Consider an analogy: I write short stories. Copyright law states that
> you do not have permission to publish my short stories in an anthology
> unless I grant it to you.

Subject to the limits in law yes. 

> I grant blanket permission for _anyone_ to reprint my stories in their
> collections, but _only_ if the other stories in each collection are all
> stories which have been made available under the same terms.

And as a publisher I publish your work and a different work under different
covers. The retailer happens to decide to resell them as a bundle.

Now I'd like to get to that state anyway so that firmware is nicely seperate
from the kernel sources and it is clearer about licenses and what is what. I'm
unconvinced it is neccessary, but I am not a lawyer.