Re: Proposed: Debian's Five Freedoms for Free Works
Scripsit Adam Warner <lists@consulting.net.nz>
> On Tue, 2003-06-17 at 02:54, Henning Makholm wrote:
> > It must be possible for me to enjoy the freedoms without
> > communicating with anybody else but those whom I voluntarily
> > decide to distribute the software to.
> Why should I have to communicate with anyone, even in a situation of
> copyleft code distribution?
Well, distribution is a form of communication. It would be too much
to require that I should be able to distribute software to someone
without sending them data (i.e. communication).
> And how does your proposal proscribe the limits of information
> disclosure when one does voluntarily decide to distribute the
> software?
It says that the only party I can be required to disclose anything
(such as the source) to is the one to whom I distribute.
> So communication isn't the root issue. The root issue is the extent of
> one's information disclosure obligation (at the point of distribution).
No. If that were the root issue, we wouldn't have problems with "you
must send patches upstream" licenses - they do not require me to
disclose anything to upstream that I don't have to disclose to the
recipient I choose. On the contrary the root issue is exactly that
such a license tries to dictate *whom* I must disclose this
information to.
--
Henning Makholm "I didn't even know you *could* kill chocolate ice-cream!"
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