Re: Grub & accessibility

[Pavel Roskin]

Quoting Samuel Thibault <address@hidden>:

> (sorry phcoder for the duplication)
>
> Robert Millan, le Fri 10 Jul 2009 19:22:48 +0200, a écrit :
> > We've made some exceptions, but in general, we'd like to keep the GRUB
> > codebase made entirely of FSF-copyrighted code, or at least code we
> > have disclaimers for.
> >
> > OTOH, we don't want to discard valuable work that wasn't written   
> > specifically
> > for GRUB.  Perhaps Marco or Okuji will allow an exception for this case.
>
> The thing is that it would be sad to re-implement these drivers, as
> getting hardware to make sure they work is hard.

One of the main advantages of Free Software is that it allows code  
sharing.  For a GNU project to reject accessibility code solely  
because it's copyrighted by others would be a very bad move from the  
PR perspective.  I can easily imagine stories badmouthing FSF and  
GPLv3 over the issue.  Someone or something hurting disabled people is  
the kind of story journalists like.

It would still be legal for another entity to take the GRUB code and  
combine it with the accessibility code, but it would be an unnecessary  
fork.

--
Regards,
Pavel Roskin