Re: Proposal for clarification of DFSG.1

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit Roland Stigge <stigge@debian.org>

> There's a different way possible:

>   The license of a Debian component may not restrict
>   any party from selling or giving away the software
>   as a component of an aggregate software distribution
>   containing programs from several different sources.
> + (But may prohibit selling the software itself alone.)
>   The license may not require a royalty or other fee
>   for such sale.

This is, to the best of my awareness, the debian-legal consensus
interpretation.

The consensus, however, goes on to point out that an "aggregate
software distribution" may consist of the program in question plus a
Bourne shell implementation of "Hello, world", and the license *must*
allow such an aggregate to be sold for profit.

In short, we accept "you may not sell this program alone" clauses, but
only if they have loopholes big enough to make them completely
ineffective in practice.

-- 
Henning Makholm                      "The compile-time type checker for this
                           language has proved to be a valuable filter which
                      traps a significant proportion of programming errors."