4 ms·

This part has a morale, too, and it is almost the same: don't trust this person. Read the licenses carefully and rip out parts which give Stallman any poss

This part has a morale, too, and it is almost the same: don't trust this person. Read the licenses carefully and rip out parts which give Stallman any possibility to influence your future. Phrases like [...] GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. just invites him to screw you when it pleases him. Rip out the "any later version" part and make your own decisions when to use a different license since otherwise he can potentially do you or your work harm. I never noticed this before. Whether it was intentionally conspiratorial or not, it's certainly an important legal and organizational consideration.

erik_seaberg 9y ago
The legal landscape changes, if slowly. You have to decide up front who has the right to update the license, because otherwise with mixed copyright holders the answer is "nobody, ever".
eesmith 9y ago
It was what enabled the compatibility with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license that the Wikimedia Foundation used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License#Compatibility_with_Creative_Commons_licensing_terms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License... It could seemingly be used for malice, eg, if there's a hostile takeover of the FSF and the new owners change the license. However, the copyright contribution agreement that people make with the FSF essentially contractually promises that the contributions will only be used for free software, making that scenario impossible.