Re: LPPL and non-discrimination
Mark Rafn <dagon@dagon.net> writes:
> 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.
That isn't quite the consensus I've seen. For example, a license
which claimed to be MIT/X11 for educators only, and GNU GPL for
non-educators only, would, I argue, be unfree[1]. There needs to be a
single free path through the license available to everybody; at that
point, the license is effectively reduced to that set of conditions
and is free.
> 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.
I think this hints at something closer to what I've seen.
-Brian
Footnotes:
[1] In addition, it would be internally inconsistent if it tried to
prevent educators from distributing further under the MIT/X11
license, or non-educators from distributing further under the GPL.
--
Brian T. Sniffen bts@alum.mit.edu
http://www.evenmere.org/~bts/
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