Re: Xbae widget license
On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 03:30:36PM -0500, Don Armstrong wrote:
> > Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute this material for any
> > purpose and without fee is hereby granted,
>
> I'm concerned that this restricts us (or our cd vendors) from being
> able to distribute the material for a fee [ie, on cd images and the
> like.]
Does this mean that you can do these things without paying a fee to
upstream, or that you can only do these things if you don't charge a fee
for doing so?
> If it was written 'with or without fee' I suppose it would be ok, or
> if there was some clarification that indicated that a reasonable fee
> for the medium could be charged.
It needs to be able to be sold in aggregate to pass DFSG#1.
> > I am a bit worried about the line: 'that the name of any author not
> > be used in advertising or publicity bla bla'. Debian won't
> > explicitely advertise this widget I guess, so that would be okay?
>
> That worried me a bit as well, although what I presume they mean is
> that you may not use bellcore or the authors names to endorse your
> product or whatever. Perhaps a clarification from the author would be
> sufficient here? (The other X style licenses are much clearer in this
> regard.)
This seems to be the same as the 3-clause BSD license's third clause. I
believe negative advertising clauses are always OK.
(Though, I wonder what would happen if I, having contributed somewhat to
a BSD or Xbae-licensed program, were to give permission to Debian to use
my world-famous name in its advertising. Since I don't hold sole the
copyright of the program I contributed to, I can't simply waive this ...)
--
Glenn Maynard
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