Fedora Freedom and linux-libre

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jun 14, 2008, David Woodhouse <dwmw2 at infradead.org> wrote:

> But there is no reasonable scope for different opinions on the question
> of whether the GPL _may_, under copyright law, restrict your right to
> incorporate the GPL'd Program in a collective work.

Or rather refrain from granting you the permission you need in order
to do so.

> And it does _not_ require any kind of magic "power over unrelated
> works". That phrase seems just to be a deliberate misdirection.

Exactly.  The same kind of misguided reasoning that the opponents of
the anti-tivoization clauses in GPLv3 used.  It's not power over
anything else.  It's power over how one can modify and distribute
*our* work, nothing beyond that.  If you're trying to do something
that we find to be repulsive, we can't prohibit you from doing the
repulsive thing, but we can demand you to leave our work out of it.
You can still go ahead and do the repulsive thing using other works,
of course.  So there's no power over anything else, the only power is
over our own work, and that's how copyright works.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}