Why is Fedora not a Free GNU/Linux distributions?

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jul 19, 2008, Antonio Olivares <olivares14031 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Sorry for the misunderstanding :(

Not a problem :-)

> Like I have mentioned before some Linux Distros still keep cdrtools
> and have never adopted the cdrkit cd burning software(fork of
> cdrecord).  They do not consider the issue as critical?

I don't speak for them, but if they keep on shipping it, either they
believe that's ok, or they don't even know about it.  It might make
sense to warn/ask those you know about.

> Your name is mentioned in the Tivo battles with GPL() and Linus Torvalds

> http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/17/298

Yes, indeed, I was "honored" with some of Linus' typical verbal abuse
:-)

People interested in that thread, and in forming an opinion on them
that's not too biased towards the more famous person, might be
interested in reading these posts:

http://fsfla.org/blogs/lxo/2007-07-19-gplv3-tivo-and-linux
http://fsfla.org/blogs/lxo/2007-06-29-gplv3-tivo-and-linux
http://fsfla.org/blogs/lxo/2007-07-01-gplv3-tivo-and-linux
http://fsfla.org/blogs/lxo/draft/tivoization-and-communities
http://fsfla.org/blogs/lxo/draft/forking-and-license-patching

> The language, the wording and clauses here and clauses there are
> very hard to interpret.

Unfortunately, the nature of law is that even terms that appear
obvious to laymen sometimes mean something quite different to lawyers.

Oddly, the GPL, unlike most licenses, was originally written to be
understandable by software developers, which, in addition to the
surprising use of copyright "against" itself (copyleft), makes a large
number of lawyers quite uncomfortable with its wording.

GPLv3 unfortunately became longer and somewhat heavier on the
legalese, to a large extent because of requests for improvements and
clarifications from lawyers.  I guess this is one of those cases of
not being able to have a cake and eat it too.  Or either :-)

-- 
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}