Re: licence for Truecrypt
First and foremost, if you're going to contribute on this list, please
stop using aliases and start using your real name so that others
understand on whose behalf you are speaking and more importantly, can
connect your arguments with arguments you have made previously.
Second, arguing on freeness on the basis of other groups acceptance of
licenses is a non-starter; we do not use the same metric as other
groups do, nor do they conduct their arguments in the same fashion as
we do on a public list.
Third, please try to keep intact the references and in-reply-to
headers, as well as the citations of who your quoting so others can
follow without unecessarily fragmenting the discussion.
On Fri, 30 Jun 2006, dtufs wrote:
> --- MJ Ray <mjr@phonecoop.coop> wrote:
> > but UNACCEPTABLY protects integrity of the
> > author's source (DFSG 4) due to attempting to
> > enforce a super-trademark in III.1.a
>
> The PHP License 3.0 and the Apache License 1.0 (which
> are both approved as free software license by the FSF,
> and as open source license by the OSI) require exactly
> the same thing:
They do, but those clauses have been pointed out as being problematic
multiple times. Copyright licenses should not need to invoke copyright
law to secure protections which trademark law grants to trademarks.
They're out of scope.
Finally, if such a work were to be distributed in Debian, it could not
be called truecrypt anyway, because distribution in Debian necessarily
involves modification.
> > No, by 'private use' I mean use which is private, as in not
> > public, not necessarily by a single person.
>
> The license clearly and explicitly allows private use and
> modifications both by individuals and legal entitites comprising
> more than one individual (Section III.3).
That has nothing to do with private vs. public use. Private use is use
that does not involve distribution; I like to naively think of it as
use outside of the realm of copyright law, but since preparation of
deriviative works is a right reserved to the copyright holder under US
law, it's slightly more than that.
> > MIGHT discriminate against commerce (DFSG 6) with the AS THIS
> > PRODUCT IS FREE in IV.1
>
> Actually, the GPL says the same in Section 11:
>
> "11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO
> WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM"
No, the GPL says "the program is *LICENSED* free of charge"; this
license says "the product *IS FREE*". This is a critical difference.
One covers the act of licensing, and licensing alone; the other covers
all of the product.
> No license can be 100% perfectly clear. Licenses need to be as
> general and concise as possible.
Writing licenses is an extreemly dificult task; writing good licences
is nearly impossible. Instead of writing or defending custom licenses
that contain many points of confusion and ill-defined wording, you and
the community will be much better served by using existing licenses,
with vetted legal language and well understood parameters. By writing
and defending licenses such as this, you're merely contributing to
license proliferation and incompatibility between different Free
Software projects.
Don Armstrong
--
An elephant: A mouse built to government specifications.
-- Robert Heinlein _Time Enough For Love_ p244
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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