Re: CDDL, OpenSolaris, Choice-of-venue and the star package ...

[Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org>]

Henning Makholm writes:

> Scripsit Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org>
>> Marco d'Itri writes:
>
>>> Sure, but the DFSG is not about a license being good or bad. There are
>>> plenty of "bad" licenses which are free.
>
>> Only for a strange definition of "free" (such that some might accuse
>> you of wanting to put non-free things into main).
>
> Licenses with patch clauses are widely considered "bad" even though
> they are explicitly free according to the DFSG.

Do you have any particular licenses in mind?  I only have about 1450
packages installed on my system, but none of them seem[1] to have that
kind of license.  The closest are a few packages with files that are
(in the case of apt, once were) dual licensed under the QPL and GPL.
The claim was that there *are* plenty of bad licenses, which implies
actual rather than theoretical existence or use.

Michael Poole

[1]- Judging just by the output of "grep -i '(patch|change)'
*/copyright" from /usr/share/doc, and checking context for files that
looked like they might be a patch clause.