[PD] PiDiP's legal status

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Fri, 20 Jan 2006, juto aviten wrote:

> ok I saw this message down to pd-ot... and now I start to understood the
> all thing... Ethically I am quite agree with Yves, it's true that free
> software are used by Bush administration and for military & repressive
> use sometimes... it's a hudge problem in a way, politically...

Well, everyone agrees that somebody somewhere is using something for
repressive use, and that it's done in a way that the law can't find about
it or can't apply to it or even if it applies you can't get the police to
deal with it. Lots of free media is used to justify all sorts of crap and
that's not limited to software. Just think of a handful of unsuspecting
german philosophers of the 1800's and you almost have the whole history of
excuses for oppression in the 1900's.

Software licenses aren't magical spells that people obey to: if they were,
then Yves wouldn't be violating the GPL, for example. Well, maybe they are
magical spells, but one needs a lawyer, a judge and an effective police,
and they all have to be non-corrupted at the same time; and then you need
to hire the lawyer; and then... well, you see, saying something in a
license is only a first step. But if Yves can't even comply with the GPL,
I don't know how the military would comply with Yves.

In the meanwhile all that the non-free clause does is make life more
complicated for promoters of free software.

> The problem here is that Yves does that on software based on effectv & PDP
> which PIDIP is based on and he added his own personnal & ethical part in the
> licences whithout talk with the others about this, am I wrong? So he's comment
> (add) to the licence seems to be in conflict with the source...

there isn't a single problem, there are three:

  1. there's a non-free license;

  2. there's also the GPL license and confusion about which license(s)  
     really apply;

  3. there's the conflict between the non-free license and GPL'ed
     components like PDP and EffecTV.

 _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada