Re: New DFSG Draft revision #3
On Tue, Jan 19, 1999 at 08:56:09PM -0800, Darren Benham wrote:
> On 20-Jan-99 Anderson MacKay wrote:
> > As I read the license, it just requires that you display notice that your
> > website was created using Zope, e.g. a sort of "powered by Zope" logo
> > kinda thing, and you need a "credits" page of some sort. I'm not even
> > sure this license requires that this notice be on every page, just that it
> > be in some obvious place near the "front" of the site. (But I don't have
> > the license here in front of me, unfortunately ...)
Thanks, Andy for your uninvited response. Probably the best
description of Zope I've seen so far.
> So, does Zope run when the URL is clicked and serve the HTML (like
> CGI?) or does it generate the HTML page before hand and it just get served
> "real time".
It *is* a CGI script. In fact its preferred use is to run alongside
the web server as a long running process (LRP). It has an event-loop
just as an ordinary application.
> I think, and this is just off the cuff, that my problem with the
> license, be it the former OR latter, is the fact that the USER now
> has a license issue to deal with. I think (again, on the fly) that
> there should be no extra licensing worries for the user. They
> shouldn't *have* to look at the license of every package, the first
> time they use it, to determine if there are any "extra" restrictions
> that they have to comply with and we don't have (AFAIK) any way to
> inform the user that I would consider adequate. (ie, they might not see
> messages via dselect/dpkg if a sysadmin installs it for them. They
> might not see the description if they install via apt... etc)
You're certainly right, but this is in fact a problem with the notice
clause in your drafts.
You mean USER in contrast to DEVELOPER ? This distinction is a little
bit deliberate with free software IMHO, since we do educate the users
that they have the right to modify the software.
Imagine you have an GUI application. According to your draft, the
application's license could carry a requirement that however you
modify the application, you had to include credits to the original
author in the start window.
Now imagine the application came with an library. Could this
requirement also apply to the library ? I.e. could the license require
that I have to credit the author of the library in any application
that used the library ? I guess we won't call that DFSG free.
But now what if I would take the original, DFSG free application with
the notice requirement, moved the biggest part of it in a library (I'm
certainly allowed to do that according to the DFSG) and used that
library in my own application. According to the DFSG, this modified
library would be free of notice requirements, but then this is
certainly not what the author of the application wanted.
I don't see the borderline between restrictions on the USER (which you
don't like) and restrictions on the DEVELOPER (which you seem to
tolerate).
Gregor
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