After rereading this text a few times, I realized that it doesn't
actually say anything of value. It looks pretty but is devoid of
meaning (or, less glibly, it doesn't express any concept not already
covered by other text in the tutorial), so I'm cutting it entirely.
Some of the text pasted in earlier commits was certainly useful, but
needed a complete rework.
Also, the text pasted was far too terse, and more detail was needed.
Therefore, I've moved text around and build a more comprehensive
Background section. I've moved the burgeoning "Understanding Who's
Enforcing" section into the Background chapter and made it complete.
Probably the most bizarre (?) change I've made here is coining this
acronym COGEO. This is non-optimal for sure, and I've added a FIXME to
seek a better term.
The enforcement section now has an integrated paragraph describing how
enforcement relates to copyright, and refers back to a related section
much earlier in the tutorial.
Software Freedom Law Center, a small law firm specializing in Open
Source, recently published its so-called "Guide to GPL Compliance,
Second Edition":
http://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2014/SFLC-Guide_to_GPL_Compliance_2d_ed.html
The Firm's document is substantially less comprehensive than this one;
however, their document contained a few phrases and paragraphs that
seemed useful and accurate. This commit incorporates the useful
material from that work into this one (as permitted by the CC BY-SA 4.0
license, which the Software Freedom Law Center applied to their work).
The useful sections have been pasted without proper textual integration
into the appropriate sections of this tutorial. A few are currently
commented out entirely and marked with appropriate FIXME's. Meanwhile,
the text that seems immediately useful is *not* commented out, and is
marked with "FIXME-URGENT". Additional work is now required to
integrate the new text properly into this tutorial.
Careful readers who compare this commit with The Firm's document will
find that I passed on inclusion of some seemingly useful material.
Unfortunately, The Firm's text contained some inaccuracies, and frames
discussion primarily from a for-profit perspective. More disturbingly,
a few statements even directly contradicted the FSF's stated policies.
Of course, The Firm clearly claims "this document does not express the
views, intentions, policy, or legal analysis of any SFLC clients or
client organizations", but I could not in good conscience adopt, as the
official advice in this tutorial, any text that conflicts with the FSF's
policies, nor will I incorporate any puffery that subtly kowtows to
for-profit corporate interests.
Nevertheless, given The Firm's perceived stature, I briefly considered
including policy-conflicting statements, attributing them as alternative
third-party opinions; many of the FSF's own opinions were already
incorporated in that manner earlier this year. Indeed, I will not prima
facie reject future patches that integrate such statements naturally for
this tutorial. However, I feel that the didactic value of including The
Firm's attributed dissenting opinions in this tutorial does not outweigh
my editing effort required for such additional textual integration.
Regarding Software Freedom Law Center's copyrights included herein,
I took the following specific actions to comply with CC By SA 4.0:
§3(a)(1)(a)(i): This log message indicates Software Freedom Law Center
as the source of the material herein committed.
§3(a)(1)(a)(i): Copyright notices at the top level of the document,
as well as those in individual parts, are updated to
include the 2014 copyright notice from the Software
Freedom Law Center.
§3(a)(1)(a)(ii-v): The project already referred to and included a copy
§3(b)(1): of CC BY SA 4.0 International and its URL.
§3(a)(2): The attribution information is fully included in
this Git repository.
§3(a)(3): I and this project have received no such request.
§3(b)(1): The license of the larger work was already
CC BY SA 4.0 International.
§3(b)(3): No such conditions are imposed.
Most redistributors, at least with regard to embedded systems, typically
include the kernel named Linux with their distribution. As such, even
when GPLv2-or-later and/or GPLv3-{only, or-later} works are included in
the aggregation, the termination implications are effectively those of
GPLv2-only, since it's unlikely in any event the violator will remove
the GPLv2-only work (particularly if it's Linux).
Joshua Gay made contributions to all the files earlier in 2014 (see git
log) which were copyrighted by the FSF, so FSF's copyright needs
refreshed to include this year.
Denver recently added a section to the enforcement-case-studies.tex, so
his copyright notice needs to go there and at the top file.
I made changes to enforcement-case-studies.tex on top of Denver's.
Also, remove commented-out copyright notices -- the ones in the actual
text are now primary and should be maintained directly.
The older portions of this tutorial tended to favor the term "derivative
work", since that was the popular catch-all term used at the time the
text was written.
However, as the newer text regarding GPLv3 now states, FSF abandoned the
use of the term "derivative work" in the text of GPLv3 itself, for
various reasons we already discuss in the tutorial.
Therefore, the tutorial text itself should likely not rely so heavily on
the phrase "derivative work" throughout. This change herein reworks a
number of places where "derivative work" was used in the tutorial and
replaced it with other terms.
Ultimately, some word-smithing happened as part of the process of doing
this patch.
While I liked Donald's changes in the previous commit enough to take them,
and I don't agree with SFLC's (who was the last to edit those words in this
document) preference for "FOSS", I did want to make some fine tuned changes
that I think are appropriate:
* say "software freedom" rather than "Free Software" anywhere it fits the
sentence.
* Capitalize "Free Software" like that, rather than lower case as Donald's
change did.
* Say "copylefted" in a few places where that was the stronger implication.
* Say "Open Source" in two specific places where the intention is to
include OSI-approved licenses that may not be Free Software licenses.
