Relicensing rules (was: Re: BitKeeper)

[Peter Makholm <peter@makholm.net>]

Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> writes:

> On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 01:13:13PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
>> OK, perhaps the relicensing rule is not non-free; I'm less sure of
>> that.
>
> I don't think it's obvious from a casual reading of the DFSG that such a
> requirement is non-free, but perhaps it should be.

I don't think it is obvious from a very through reading of the DFSG
that such requirement is non-free. I would judge that it was eiter
considered free or never even thought about when the DFSG was
written. (probaly the second reason)

I don't see any reason for making such requirements non-free. I still
got all the freedoms FSF prescribes, I can make modifications and
share them. I cannot decide myself under which license my
modifications is distributed under but not even GPL allows me to do
that.

The only reasonable change in this direction I could see for the DFSG
is to use some sort of O'Reillys Zeroth Freedom (If I understand him
correctly):

 You should be able to make modifications on you own premisses.


No matter how much I like this freedom for my own works I wouldn't
like see it in DFSG. It would render GPL and copyleft-licenses in
general non-free. 


Shouldn't we move this to debian-project or debian-legal?

-- 
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