On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 21:03 +0100, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
None of what Alessandro described is harmful, it is explcitly allowed by the license. You are claiming that there are problems when there are none, it is like having people claiming that the GPL has problems by disallowing a GPLed project being converted into a non-free program.
I must say the analogy is completely wrong, and, I'm sorry, almost specious here.
Care to explain why?
Because you can't make a GPLed program non free against the authors will. Instead with the GFDL you can add a very nasty invariant section against the original authors will, and against the sprit of the work and he will not be able to remove that section if he wish to reuse the material in a new edition made by himself. I think this is not the sort of "freedom" a copyleft license should allow, even for documentation which I think is different from Software. I rather see using only verbatim copy licenses or GPL licenses for new works until these GFDL bugs get fixed.
In theory, anyone can go and make Linux a non-free program, since it is simply impossible to enforce the license there.
In practice I think this shows up to be false, otherwise it would have already happened, don't you think SCO would have already done that otherwise for example ?
It has happened, and it is continuing to happen. Usually it is easily solved though.
It is easy to solve just because you do not need to gather all the developers of Linux to sue someone on the use of Linux. You just need someone that have enough copyright on Linux in key parts of it, that it makes it impossible to use that kernel without the work of the person who is suing. But others have already explained this point very well, and more than theory real facts shows that.
Simo.