[PATCH] fdisk.c: major whitespace/style cleanup

[Rob Landley]

On Saturday 25 February 2006 6:57 am, Bernd Petrovitsch wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-02-25 at 10:46 +0300, Vladimir N. Oleynik wrote:
> > Bernd Petrovitsch wrote:
> > > You have to choose: Either if *is* GPL (as the license on th orignal
> > > seem to imply), then please delete that "condition" or it is not GPL
> > > which implies that you
> >
> > Each author has the inseparable right to own work.
>
> Yes, but first this comes out of local jurisdiction (which is - judging
> from your email address - Russia and I know nothing about Russian law)
> and second this cannot invalidate some parts of the GPL and leave others
> intact.
> -) US copyright allows you transfer the copyright completely without
>    trace or whatever.

You need a written instrument of conveyance explicitly transferring a 
copyright.  (You basically need a signed physical piece of paper.  It's one 
of the central issues in the current SCO vs Novell litigation being covered 
on Groklaw.)

But that's a side issue.  Licenses don't transfer copyright, they're give 
people conditional permission to exercise the rights that copyright reserves 
to the owner of the copyright, as long as the conditions are met.

These days putting something in the public domain is essentially granting an 
unlimited license for anyone to exercise any of the rights granted by 
copyright, without restriction.

> -) Austrian authors rights simply disallow transfer of the authors right
>    (it ceases 70 years after the death of the author) but you can sell
>    the use of your work.
>    And to actually have authors rights on your "work", you need a
>    substantial amount of work. So e.g. fixing typos or obvious bug fixes
>    in source code is not enough to make it a "work" in the sense of
>    Austrian author's right system.
> And in each and every case if you can't or won't comply to the GPL, you
> loose all rights from the GPL (and this rule is pretty uncontested in
> court in Austria, Germany and the US up to now AFAIK).
>
> > Its main right. Its can`t destroy ANY license.
>
> No, but it can invalidate it and then you loose all rights which may be
> given to you beforehand.

And where this is important with derived works is that you don't have the 
right to distribute the portions of the base work that your derived work 
relies on under any license but the GPL.  Even distributing standard unified 
diffs distributes three lines of context around each change...

Having a copyright on a derived work doesn't absolve you of the license terms 
applicable to the base work you derived from.  Vladimir obviously doesn't 
understand this.

> [...]
>
> > > And apart from that: You claim your license to be more "free" than the
> > > GPL and restrict the rest of the world on any change without asking
> > > you?
> >
> > I cannot subject to enforse when break my rights.
> > I know: busybox used in commercial nonGPL products.
>
> But this can't and/or doesn't remove the GPL from busybox and each
> "producer" of these "non-GPL products" must at least offer the source
> code and build description  (+ toolchain if necessary) for the GPL parts
> of that product.

The "+ toolchain if necessary" is probably unenforceable.  Makefiles could be 
considered a necessary part of the source code (and unique to your project), 
but if you compiled a binary with Microsoft Visual C you can't be made to 
distribute Microsoft Visual C to comply with the GPL.  The GPL doesn't apply 
to the operating system you run it on either, because it's not a derived work 
of that.  (A documented API is a good boundary here.)

The GPL only applies to what the copyright covers, and there are boundaries to 
what is considered a derived work (which have to do with established 
copyright law and legal precedents).  The boundaries are a bit squishy and 
arguable, but asking for the compiler and the OS is way the heck over them.  
(Your copyright on a document doesn't apply to the word processor used to 
compose the document, either.)

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.