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Anil Wang - Subject: Church's Thesis (was Re: Re: Not so disgusting.) ( Apr 2, 2001, 01:48:42 )
> > In this case, the GPL is not violated in letter or in spirit. The CORBA
> > examples may violate the vision of RMS and the FSF, but that's a different
> > matter.
> >
>
> Considering that Stallman and FSF created the GPL(and most poeple who use the
> licence are aware of this), I would assume that if it violates their vision
> then it violates the spirit it was created in and continues to be used in.
> Maybe you are unaware of where the GPL came from and it's history and this
> might explain why you miss the part of why people get up in arms at stories
> like these. Even the author of the story suggests that his "workaround"
> violates the spirit of the GPL.
>
> Patrick Schoeb
>
RMS and the RIAA are on opposite sides of the freedom debate, but they do share one common enemy "Church's Thesis" http://cs.fit.edu/~ryan/glossary.html. A direct result of Church's Thesis is that no matter what you're trying to do, there's always a way to do it with one more level of indirection, or one more after that, or one more after that, or .... There's always a way to cheat *any* system you have in place, so unless you're willing to take draconian measures that will make a lot of legitmate uses illegal, you'll just have to accept it.
CORBA-like technologies are a case in point. CORBA, XML-RPC/SOAP, and even plane old named pipes are protocols that work by communicating results back and forth. Essentially, communication can be used to simulate any linkage. If you make communication equal to linkage, you open up a whole rat's nest of legal and enforcement implications.
RMS must be pulling out his hair over the issue, since he doesn't want to become the very thing he's fighting against.
Ultimately, as RMS admits, the issue is not legal, it's moral. You can't legislate morality, but you can make laws that encourage you to do the right thing. The beauty of the GPL is that it "legislates" a set of rules that make it "okay to share without feeling taken advantage of". It's a delicate balance that's incredibly difficult to keep in the long term unless people really want it.
