Re: LPPL and non-discrimination
On Mon, 5 May 2003, Jonathan Fine wrote:
> Two contributions have said, for various reasons, that the
> guideline does not apply in this situation.
I will say it too. It's come up before, and been agreed that as long as
it does not discriminate to the point that it is non-free for any person,
group, or field of endeavor, then it is free.
> Suppose the proposed LPPL discrimination is allowed. How
> then can discrimination such as:
> If the licensee is ABC Software Inc then the licensee
> may freely incorporate this work into its proprietary
> software.
> be resisted?
It cannot. I believe this is free software (provided it's GPL or some
other free license for everyone else). In fact, if ABC Software Inc holds
the copyright and resleases the software under the GPL, then this
statement is true. Even if someone else holds the copyright, they can
grant additional permissions to ABC Software Inc after releasing something
under GPL.
This clause doesn't have to be part of the license. It could be an extra
grant in a seperate unrelated license only to those people affected. You
may or may not even know that such a license is in use.
Dual-licensing has never been considered by Debian to be discriminatory,
as long as there's a free license available to every person, group, and
field of endeavor.
--
Mark Rafn dagon@dagon.net <http://www.dagon.net/>
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