Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TECH TOPIC] Firmware signing

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>]

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On Wed, 2015-07-29 at 16:39 -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Wed, 2015-07-29 at 18:32 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > ... as well as contradicting its explicit statement that its intention
> > is to "control the distribution of derivative OR COLLECTIVE WORKS".
> 
> That quote loses the last important piece; that paragraph, which I'll
> quote in full
> 
>         Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or
>         contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the
>         intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of
>         derivative or collective works based on the Program.
> 
> says that no additional rights over pieces that were written by another
> (in this case a firmware provider) and are not based on the Program are
> claimed.  That rather supports the idea that the extent of the license
> attachment is limited to derivation.

The more conventional interpretation of that paragraph — the
interpretation which *doesn't* require us to believe that the GPL
wasted all those words *explicitly* talking about things which are "not
derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent
and separate works in themselves", only to contradict itself and say
"haha just joking; *ALL* aggregation is fine" — is that this is the GPL
clarifying how it operates within the constraints of copyright law.

There is a common — though bogus — complaint about the 'infectious'
nature of the GPL, which goes along the lines of "how can they require
that I publish the source code to the bits that *I* wrote. Copyright
law gives them no rights over *my* code".

The paragraph you cite above is more reasonably interpreted as a
clarification that the GPL isn't claiming any *rights* over your own
separate works, and that it merely operates by withholding permission
to use the *GPL'd* part in that context.

But again, I'm not requiring that you publicly accept this point of
view. There is plenty of scope for debate, and it's not impossible that
a court *could* uphold your interpretation and effectively just delete
the paragraphs of the GPL that you don't like.

All I'm asking is that you stop making the bogus claim that yours is
the *only* possible interpretation. It isn't even the sanest one.

-- 
dwmw2

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