For Approval: GPLv3

[Alexander Terekhov]

On 8/31/07, Matthew Flaschen <matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu> wrote:
> Alexander Terekhov wrote:
> > On 8/31/07, Matthew Flaschen <matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu> wrote:
> > [...]
> >> Where exactly does GPLv2 say explicitly it is not a contract?  The
> >> situation hasn't changed at all in GPLv3.  As far as I know, the FSF
> >> stills views it as a license, but this isn't directly stated in either
> >
> > When defending itself in Wallace v. FSF lawsuit, the Free Software
> > Foundation went on record with this:
>
> You've totally ignored my point, which was that neither
>  GPLv2 nor GPLv3 said GPL was not a contract.

GPLv3 said "not a contract" in its first draft.

http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/barcelona-moglen-transcript.en.html

------
Q7: How are you thinking about changing something in the title of the
section, I think it's 9, "not a contract", because that that's a bit
incompatible with the laws in some place, like in Brazil - I'm from
Brazil.

I firmly disagree with that position, but nonetheless we will do
something to meet these needs. I ultimately regard these believes as
narrow-minded and foolish, it belongs to half a dozen law professors
around the world, each of whom should check his cards again, and it's
all "he". They are people with gray hair and old minds. They're not
very old minds, because if in each of their legal systems they went
to their old legal dictionaries and looked at what the word license
means, or if they got real Roman about it and went and looked in the
Institutes of Justinian to find out what license means, they would
discover that a license is a unilateral permission, not an
obligation, and so what happens is that these minds that say these
thing, they're stuck in a little space, a thousand years after
Justinian and before the Second World War.
------

He he.

Institutes of Justinian:

"A lunatic cannot enter into any contract at all, because he does not
understand what he is doing."

regards,
alexander.