Re: Please pass judgement on X-Oz licence: free or nay?
On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 01:37:48PM +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 03, 2004 at 02:01:03AM +1000, Daniel Stone wrote:
> > /*
> > * Copyright 2003 by David H. Dawes.
> > * Copyright 2003 by X-Oz Technologies.
> > * All rights reserved.
> > *
> > * Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
> > * copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"),
> > * to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation
> > * the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,
> > * and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
> > * Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
>
> (I recall hearing something like this from Branden on IRC, but anyway)
>
> Doesn't explicitly grant permission to distribute modified software, so it
> fails to comply with DFSG #3.
This isn't a problem. It gives permission to distribute, and permission
to modify. The only problem we've seen that resembles this was the old
Pine license: it gave permission to modify and distribute, but the copyright
holder claimed after the fact that "distribute and modify" didn't include
distributing modified versions. It's an obviously bogus interpretation;
we honored it in the interests of complying with the copyright holder's
wishes, but it shouldn't be considered the default interpretation.
This can happen with any free license. For example, the MIT license
says "associated documentation files". It's possible that a copyright
holder might claim that this includes even documentation written by a
third party, which would place unfullable requirements, and fail DFSG#9.
We should worry about ambiguous licenses, but not about word-twisting
to claim a license says something that it does not, unless it's actually
happening.
--
Glenn Maynard
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