On Apr 30, 2004, at 1:44 PM, Michael Poole wrote:
Marc Boucher writes:
I am not threatening anyone, only reminding folks that making
unsubstantiated public allegations that unfairly damage a person or
company's reputation is wrong and generally illegal.
Marc
I do not think the allegations are unsubstantiated or unfair;
A number of allegations were clearly wrong. Some posters have even admitted or even criticized these factually incorrect accusations. Instead of wasting more time/energy arguing or litigating, we hope that this debate will now end peacefully and have helped to clarify and resolve problems.
on the
contrary, people have identified with specificity what is offensive
and probably illegal. Might I remind you of 17 USC 1201(b)(1):
It is extremely ironic that the free software community who was so strongly opposed to the DMCA and considering it so evil now invokes it in such a far fetched manner (Alan Cox was probably cynical about this but you don't seem to be). It is also far from clear whether tainting and the MODULE_LICENSE() macro are a "technological measure that effectively protects" anything.
Again, our workaround is purely cosmetic, its side-effect on tainting totally unintentional, we are sorry that it has caused so much concern and we will be fixing it in good faith (even if it is a broken concept), while hoping that the underlying problems will be correctly resolved in future kernels/modutils.
On Apr 30, 2004, at 2:01 PM, Timothy Miller wrote:
Nope. The real objection was misleading people about the license of the module. That part was clearly wrong.
We did not mislead people. Our license terms are clear and openly stated in many places.
You could perhaps argue that we "mislead" a string comparison to fix a usability problem, but this kind of technique is very common today, especially under Linux where numerous interfaces are simulated.
you pretend that things like Wine are wrong and misleading when making windows software believe that it runs under the real thing?