Why is Fedora not a Free GNU/Linux distributions?

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jul 24, 2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:

> Aside from the moral issue of demanding that other people give up
> choices of terms on their own contributions

The underlying assumption that the GPL does this is incorrect.  You
can choose whatever terms you like, as long as they don't deny the
rights granted through the GPL.  I.e., you can add permissions to your
own contributions, but you can't use your contributions to subtract
from the freedoms any recipient of the whole work would get if the
whole work was available only under the GPL.

> GPL-encumbered.

This phrase does not make sense.  It's like e.g. "helium-enhanced
paperweight" (assuming it's designed for use in an atmosphere more
dense than helium, like ours :-)

If anything, helium would reduce the paperweight's ability to keep
paper from flying, just like the GPL lifts copyright holder's ability
to keep the software from being modified and/or distributed.

-- 
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}