Re: Please pass judgement on X-Oz licence: free or nay?

[Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu>]

Daniel, you'll probably be happier if you set a Mail-Followup-To
header to ensure you're CC'd.

Daniel Stone <daniels@debian.org> writes:

> Now, with a release only 23 days away (isn't this better already?),
> we've hit a speedbump. It's been alleged in Debian circles that the
> XFree86 autoconfig code is non-free[0], and I've filed a release-blocker
> bug on X.Org[1] accordingly.

Well, there's only one potential problem:

>  * Except as contained in this notice, the name of the copyright holder(s)
>  * and author(s) shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote
>  * the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written
>  * authorization from the copyright holder(s) and author(s).

That's clearly GPL-incompatible -- I don't know that that's a problem
for the relevant code, but I'd imagine it would be for *some* X code.

I think it's right on the border of freedom, but on the non-free side
of that border.  It prohibits some true statements -- if I'm trying to
sell some kiosk to a third party, and he asks me who wrote the
autoconfig code, I *can't tell him*.  That seems pretty weird, in a
situation in which I allegedly have freedom.

I can't even put "Copyright 2004 Ben Bitdiddle, some parts Copyright
200x David Dawes" in there.  Heck, I can't even write this message,
talking about how great X.Org's software is and how much I love the
autoconfig stuff by David Dawes!  This very paragraph violates that
license.

Surely that can't be Free.

-Brian

-- 
Brian Sniffen                                       bts@alum.mit.edu