🚀 go-pugleaf

Piercarlo Grandi wrote:
> Perhaps Sony regards that all their licensees as their contractors, in
> which case under the GPL giving them the GCC it is not distribution to a
> third party. This would be straining credulity on a massive scale.

This is why I don't like RMS' conclusion of distribution, moreover, I
think it's all wrong. His halo St. iGNUcius HD platter shall smash into
1024 pieces. After all, the induhviduals that sign a Sony NDA (or a
Cygnus employment contract, or whatever) are still not slaves, and
receive, as persons, copies of GCC to use (and modify). Though their IP
might be signed off to their employer or contract partner, and thus
belongs to those, the nature of a employment or work contract is the
same as an NDA - it is not binding for GCC code.

Employees aren't covered in intellecutal equivalents of
whole-body-condoms, nor are they rightless slaves. Every intellectual
work they do is still theirs, and only belongs exclusively to the
company they work for, because they sold it by signing a copyright
transfer agreement. This CTA is a violation of the GPL if it limits the
redistribution rights. Any disgruntled employee or contractor can IMHO
legally take GPL'd code he was working on with him.

BTW: though the FSF is legal copyright owner of GCC, they are not in the
position to change the license. The copyright ownership is a)
nonexclusive (the original authors in person still are 100% copyright
owner), and b) bound to the protection of that software - i.e. FSF has
only the right to sue for violations of the GPL, not to change the
license. And furthermore, due to the huge number of contributions to
GCC, I suppose not everybody actually did the copyright transfer
paperwork.

The spirit of free software is that it is used, shared, and worked on by
free men (and a few free women), not slaves, servants, or contractors.

I completely agree with the idea of not being forced to distribute
changes - the changes might be only useful for me, I don't want to show
my inability to indent C statements using Linus' conventions, etc. But
whenever someone else gets a binary, (s)he has the rights to get the
sources, too, and exercise the rights under GPL.

So, I'm fine with internal projects not being shipped. But I'm not fine
with internal projects not being shipped, because some employee
contract, NDA, or whatever takes away rights of the users of code which
*I*, as author of GPL'd software, definitely *want* the recipients to
have. I don't care about user count, I care about user freedom (with the
restriction to give no freedom to the enemies of freedom).

-- 
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/