Re: draft for new Vim license
Branden Robinson wrote:
> Thanks very much for putting effort into this, Mr. Moolenaar. I know a
> lot of people don't find it easy to deal with paranoid license freaks.
Thanks for taking a good look at the new text. I'll include most of
your suggestions.
> > You are also allowed to include executables that you made from the
> ^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^
> permitted distribute
Does "allowed" and "permitted" mean something different?
> > modified Vim you distribute. This may be done in the form of a
> > context diff. You can chose what license to use for new code you
> > add, so long as it does not restrict present or future official Vim
> > distributions in any way.
>
> Uh, I think that asking people to use a license that does not restrict
> future official Vim distributions in any way is making an impossible
> demand. They cannot know what license may be placed on Vim in the
> future.
>
> Can I suggest this instead?
>
> "You can choose what license to use for the changes you make, as long as
> it does not restrict the ability of anyone to comply with this license
> when they use a modified version of Vim that includes your changes."
>
> That's basically what you mean, right?
I'm not sure. I would like to allow people to use any license for the
new code that they write. After all, it's their work. But, at the same
time I don't want this to result in "bad things":
- A proprietary version of Vim being made available (or sold) to a large
audience. Thus someone slightly modifiying Vim and making money from
it, without the possibility for me to get a chance to include the
changes in the official release.
- That it would not be possible to re-implement the same functionality
and add it to the official Vim release (e.g., it should not be allowed
to patent a specific solution).
At the same time it should be possible for a company to make some
changes which they want to keep a secret and use that changed version
only within the company. The demand that the source code is available
to everybody who uses this version should prevent the first of the above
"bad things" from happening. The idea is that a company that would try
to sell a modified version of Vim for $$$ doesn't want to include the
source code. But the patent thing must be avoided by adding a remark to
the license. That's why I added the "does not restrict..." part.
This is the tricky part of the new license!
> Also, you regard the availability of Debian source packages as complying
> with c), right?
I think that Debian always makes the source code available to me (in
fact, to everybody), thus it would fall under a).
--
I'm sure that I asked CBuilder to do a "full" install. Looks like I got
a "fool" install, instead. Charles E Campbell, Jr, PhD
/// Bram Moolenaar -- Bram@moolenaar.net -- http://www.moolenaar.net \\\
((( Creator of Vim -- http://vim.sf.net -- ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim )))
\\\ Help me helping AIDS orphans in Uganda - http://iccf-holland.org ///
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