Patrik Stridvall ps@leissner.se wrote:
WINE should rise above this agenda and not become an agent of it.
What agenda?
The GPL/LGPL works in ways that are almost the dual to fair use. Very simplified: It uses copyright to extend fair use.
No. If anything, it seems to be using licencing rules to negate copyrights. It really wants to make a copyright into "a right to copy it". Even taking what you say, if you extend what is "fair" use, you obviously must be making it less fair somewhere else....
As I said, very simplified.
What I meant is that the mechanism that forces release of the extension of the LGPL (read: copyleft) is similar to the case where fair use is extended so I take legally take the work instead.
Of course fair use requires the use of "pull" which my be of less use if the work is compiled into a binary.
The copyleft mechanism forces "push" of the source code which is better in the case of software.
I observed that there are some theoretical similarites between fair use and copyleft. So seeing copyleft as some sort of contracted or licensed fair use makes sense.
This suggest that a too broad fair use have similar problem that a too broad application of copyleft.
And indeed both have the freeloader problem for example.
I by this wanted to illustrate that copyleft is not something inherantly "evil" as Brett Glass are apparently crusading against.
Like the case for fair use a little copyleft is good as long as you don't get to much.