Andreas Roehler <andreas.roehler(a)online.de&gt; writes: Wrong. Of Public Domain software. But if we are talking about copylefted software, the concept is that that the upstream author retains the legal means to keep derivative works as free as his own work. And of you take a look at the respective bodies of code that are available as public domain and those that are available as copyrighted software, clearly public domain has not broken through in the market. BSD-licensed software and its derivatives (like Solaris) have only been made freely available after GNU/Linux broke through, even though starting out later. If you take a look at typical Linux GPL compliance lawsuits, you'll see that most of Linux is effectively public domain since nobody bothers pursuing his copyright claims (which are for a very minor and often not identifiable part of the whole). Typical plaintiffs are the authors of the netfilter code. Which is actually rather ridiculous and leaves a very small party with the burden of effectively doing the compliance work for the work of many people. With FSF-assigned GNU software, the FSF does the compliance work. And it can do so for _substantial_ rather than minuscule parts of the whole. So it can take care that the teeth that have been designed into the GPL are actually sitting in a live jaw. That's not contradicting the spirit of free software, but rather upholding it. It means a one-time hassle and nuisance for contributors, yes. I think it somewhat too cheap to call people brain-damaged that have taken a lot of work consulting with people versed in the law, because they came to different conclusions as you did without consulting anybody. Richard did not write copyright law. The line counting nuisance is what the lawyers of the FSF have figured out as the boundaries where the FSF is still being in safe conformance with the requirements they see in connection with assuring the legal workability of the GPL. Assignment is an inconvenience. Unfortunately, I have not seen convincing proof that it is an unnecessary inconvenience. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta