Re: Microsoft needs a help strategy

[ZnU]

In article <4981AC14.7050603@mail.com>, Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> 
wrote:

> ZnU wrote:
> > If we're talking about Party A redistributing Party B's unmodified GPL'd 
> > work without making the source available, this may be true. But this is 
> > trivial, since the source is available to anyone who wants it in this 
> > instance from Party B. If a court found against the GPL in a case along 
> > these lines, nothing substantial would change.
> 
> Untrue. The FSF very clearly spells out its philosophy. It believes
> that it is an affirmative benefit for users to have the four freedoms,
> that it is harmful to users to deny them any of those freedoms, and in
> using the GPL, it acts for the benefit of those users and to prevent
> them from being harmed by being denied their freedoms or not being
> informed about them when they have those rights. To the extent that
> party B fails to honor the terms of the GPL, the FSF as copyright
> holder believes that harm is being caused to B's users.
> 
> The simplest thing you're missing in "just get it from A" is that
> without proper compliance with the GPL from B, users will not know
> what rights they have to the software they receive, or its provenance,
> or where to obtain its source.

I understand that the FSF is really, really hung up on every detail of 
the GPL, but frankly, they're fanatics. If this specific provision of 
the GPL was invalidated for some reason, very few users or developers of 
GPL software would be impacted in any material way.

-- 
"What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them
‹ that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer
apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too
small, but whether it works [...]"        -- Barack Obama, January 20th, 2008