[META] a plea

[Alexander Terekhov]

On 9/11/07, Chris Travers <chris.travers at gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> circumscribes accepted topics on this list.  Furthermore if you request a
> list faq, again there is none.

I'd like to suggest initial entry:

Q1) What is an open source license?

A1) It is a contract. (Discussion: "Eben Moglen has a J. D. from Yale.
 He has been  admitted to the bar in New York and before the Supreme
Court.  He has clerked in district court and for Justice Thurgood
Marshall.  He has held a professorship of law and legal history at
Columbia for over a decade.  He is not ignorant of the law.  It is my
opinion that he knows damn well that there is no such thing as
"copyright-based license" and never has been.

It's very useful as a propaganda device to make it appear that there
is some rich vein of unmined law in this area, and therefore some
difficulty in applying the mountain of case law relevant to any given
fact pattern involving the GPL.  But the truth as I see it (and I am
not alone) is that the GPL is a somewhat unconventionally drafted but
otherwise completely routine contract of adhesion.  If this is in fact
the truth, then many of the things that he, and other attorneys
closely associated with the FSF, say in public about the GPL are
untrue, perhaps even deliberately misleading.  That doesn't inspire my
respect." -- Michael K. Edwards).

regards,
alexander.