Path: utzoo!telly!ddsw1!mcdchg!rutgers!labrea!agate!eris.berkeley.edu!mellon
From: mellon@eris.berkeley.edu (Ted Lemon)
Newsgroups: gnu.gcc
Subject: Re: More confusion on GNU copying conditions
Message-ID: <17353@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 22 Nov 88 07:53:10 GMT
References: <8811131422.AA00325@sugar-bombs.ai.mit.edu> <10602@s.ms.uky.edu>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Distribution: gnu
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 30

In article <10602@s.ms.uky.edu> david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron) writes:
>How can some action you guys take remove my
>copyright rights?  That is, by the existing copyright laws I have the
>rights to publish/not publish *my* code as I wish.  You guys have the
>rights to publish/not publish *your* code as you wish.  It cannot be
>legal for you guys to be able to restrict what I do with *my* code.

You are missing something obvious here.   You're quite right that the FSF
has no legal recourse to control your distribution of your code.   However,
the FSF does have the right to control the distribution if its code.
The GNU license prohibits you from distributing GNU code linked together
with your code without making available your source code as well as the
GNU source code.

You may certainly ship your code linked with non-GNU libraries.   If you
ship your code with GNU libraries without abiding by the terms of the
GNU license, the FSF will have legal recourse to stop you.   That's
different from being able to say that since you violated the license,
your code now belongs to the FSF, which seems to be what you're implying
above.

In summary, it's not legal for the FSF to restrict what you do with
your code except that it may prevent you from doing illegal things
with its code and your code in combination, or with its code alone.

I leave moral arguments, which seem quite distinct from legal arguments,
to interested parties.   Hopefully, interested parties who will flame
by private email, rather than on the public net.

				_MelloN_