On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, you wrote:
Hi John, hi all,
- John Tapsell tapselj0@cs.man.ac.uk [20010620 09:51 +0100]:
I don't know whether this is correct or not, but I like your reasoning :) However... who cares?
Well, I think we should care. The FSF(E) is _the_ entity to guard over the GNU GPL. It should actively try to prevent it's missues and speak out if missues occures.
The guardians :)
You made some good points.. But I don't think you can stop them. Example. I create a stub .dll which only has the function names, but no code. Then I distribute my program, with just about all the features disabled. And a text file saying "To enable all the features do NOT *cough cough wink wink* replace our dll with the gnu one (which we have included _only_ because we wanted to fill up disk space). If you do I will not be responsible, and have told u not to"
Then what?
If they go to all that trouble ...
Going through trouble wouldn't make it right. A big software vendor with enough ressources could try to use this kind of reasoning for his benefit and harm free software in doing so. But if it pays off to do this, if the advantage gained is bigger than the loss incured by the anger of the free software community, a firm /could/ decide in favour of this reasoning. Do we want that to happen?
And would you risk it?
Of course not. Luckily I'm not in the position to provide this kind of 'service'. But what if my boss decides that following this reasoning is worth the risk and he tells me do provide the service of linking the free library to the proprietary piece of software: what shall I do? I'd have to say no or try to argue against it.
Regards Lutz -- Lutz Horn lh@lutz-horn.de For PGP information see header.
---------------------------------------- Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="unnamed" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Description: ----------------------------------------