Re: Corel's apt frontend

[bruce@perens.com (Bruce Perens)]

> From: Raul Miller <moth@debian.org>
> <quote>
>   0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains
> a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed
> under the terms of this General Public License.  The "Program", below,
> refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program"
> means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law:
> that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it,
> either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another
> language.  (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in
> the term "modification".)  Each licensee is addressed as "you".
 
Surely you can see that is circular. To paraphrase, "The program is the
program or a derivative work of the program". There is no definition there,
unless you consider "A rose is a rose" to be a definition.

> The act of running the Program is not restricted

This is going to make it extremely difficult to convince anyone that the act
of running th program through its intended interface, or packaging the program
with a work that runs it through its intended interface, can possibly create
a derived work.

So, you can circumvent the GPL through various kinds of interfaces that allow
one program to refer to another without explicit copying. It's a problem in
the GPL that should be fixed. I don't believe we can talk our way around it
without fixing the GPL first, and then it only applies to future work.

	Thanks

	Bruce