Re: Grub & accessibility

[Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko]

On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 4:51 PM, Pavel Roskin<address@hidden> wrote:
> Quoting Samuel Thibault <address@hidden>:
>
>> (sorry phcoder for the duplication)
>>
>> Robert Millan, le Fri 10 Jul 2009 19:22:48 +0200, a écrit :
>>>
>>> We've made some exceptions, but in general, we'd like to keep the GRUB
>>> codebase made entirely of FSF-copyrighted code, or at least code we
>>> have disclaimers for.
>>>
>>> OTOH, we don't want to discard valuable work that wasn't written
>>>  specifically
>>> for GRUB.  Perhaps Marco or Okuji will allow an exception for this case.
>>
>> The thing is that it would be sad to re-implement these drivers, as
>> getting hardware to make sure they work is hard.
>
> One of the main advantages of Free Software is that it allows code sharing.
>  For a GNU project to reject accessibility code solely because it's
> copyrighted by others would be a very bad move from the PR perspective.  I
> can easily imagine stories badmouthing FSF and GPLv3 over the issue.
>  Someone or something hurting disabled people is the kind of story
> journalists like.
>
I don't care what journalists talk. They are free to write anything.
But I believe that not integrating accessibility just because the code
can't be protected by FSF would be a collective egoism and would
restrict the freedom of user. I believe the most sane decision here is
to contact the corresponding authors for license and papers. In cases
when we have license but not papers we could put drivers to separate
directory.
> It would still be legal for another entity to take the GRUB code and combine
> it with the accessibility code, but it would be an unnecessary fork.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Pavel Roskin
>
>
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-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko

Personal git repository: http://repo.or.cz/w/grub2/phcoder.git