Re: The Helixcommunity RPSL is not DFSG-free
On Sun, 9 Feb 2003, Don Armstrong wrote:
> This section has the same issues that the APSL has. IE, it fails the
> two person variant of the desert island test. Why people keep
> introducing this onerous term into their licenses is beyond me.
There are two ways this might be read. "must make modifications available
to the upstream" is agreed as a non-starter. "must make source available
to users in addition to distribution recipients" seems a lot more
reasonable to me. It passes the desert island test, but is a use
restriction, so it's hard to do under pure copyright.
And perhaps not free, but I'd argue that this is not necessarily so.
The distinction between distributing a package and making a service
available feels pretty unimportant and arbitrary to a lot of folks. I
understand (some of) the history and law behind it, but I find it
unfortunate that a company can sell a service based on modified GPL code
without making the source available to users of the service.
--
Mark Rafn dagon@dagon.net <http://www.dagon.net/>
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