On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 11:20:15AM -0800, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Jan 2001, Joseph Carter wrote:
> > 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
> >
> > The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program
> > in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the
> > program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic
> > research.
> >
> > If a license says you cannot use this software for x, that is almost
> > always a violation of the DFSG. Software that must never be modified to
> > deviate from a standard quite clearly fails the above.
>
> Uh, no. At least, not from the above - you're extrapolating "field of
> endevor" to "can not use software for x", where I presume "x" is your term
> for "non-standards-compliant use". The examples used above are very
> different from a clause talking about a protocol standard, and not just a
> technical difference. For example, a license stating "this software can't
> be redistributed by a genetics company" would leave me, if I were a
> programmer for Genentech, completely out of luck, by virtue of who I am.
> However, if it said "I can't distribute a modification that violates a
> standard", that doesn't lock me out, that just says I have a hoop I have
> to jump through. So, ethically it's a much different case.
>
> The "rationale" given (written originally by Perens, I presume) is: "the
> major intention of this clause is to prohibit license traps that prevent
> open source from being used commercially. We want commercial users to join
> our community, not feel excluded from it."
Well, I don't know how people are going to like this, but here goes
anyway.
I think we should introduce the concept of precedent into our
deliberations here on debian-legal. That is, when a clause of the
DFSG has been consistenly interpreted to mean that some aspect of a
license is or is not free, then that should be taken to be a real
factor in our deliberations.
Its application here would be thus:
Debian-legal has repeatedly held that requiring or prohibiting
particular behavior as a condition of distributiing modified versions
is in violation of the Fields of Endeavor clause of the DFSG.
Thus, the OpenDivx license is in violation of the DFSG.
References:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0012/msg00109.html
Among others. (for some reason the search engine for -legal isn't
working so well).
How does that sound?
sam th
sam@uchicago.edu
http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
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