Re: Please pass judgement on X-Oz licence: free or nay?
Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> writes:
> On Tue, Aug 03, 2004 at 11:09:24AM -0400, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
>> Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> writes:
>>
> As said, it is mostly the plain X/MIT licence, so if it is non-free, we are in
> deep trouble. Please go ahead and fill the bug report asking for the removal
> of XFree86 from debian/main.
No, it's quite different. The Dawes license says:
DD> Except as contained in this notice, the name of the copyright holder(s)
DD> and author(s) shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote
DD> the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written
DD> authorization from the copyright holder(s) and author(s).
And the BSD license says:
BSD> Neither the name of the University nor the names of its
BSD> contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived
BSD> from this software without specific prior written permission.
And the MIT license says:
MIT> ... that the name of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT> (M.I.T.) not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to
MIT> distribution of the software without specific, written prior
MIT> permission.
So there are some pretty big differences there. First, the BSD
license only limits promotion of software *derived from* the work.
That seems like it's an important difference for some sorts of
advertising restriction, but probably not this one. That is, if I
edited a freely-licensed version of the GNU Manifesto to say terrible
things, I should no longer be able to advertise it as being by RMS.
And the MIT license only talks about promoting *distribution* of the
work.
Those are both much narrower than this license, which talks about
promotion or advertising of use or modification ("other dealings") of
the work. So I can't file a bug report and mention the author's name,
because that is material promoting modification of the work.
It's not just non-free; it's not practical to work with such
restricted software.
-Brian
--
Brian Sniffen bts@alum.mit.edu
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