Re: Doubts and Ideas
On Fri, 1 Jun 2007 16:57:25 -0700, Don Armstrong <don@debian.org> said:
> On Fri, 01 Jun 2007, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>> While my preference is the GPL V2; I would be willing to accept any
>> DFSG free license, if asked. But signing away my rights mean that, in
>> theory, Debian can decide to change the license to something
>> unacceptable (look at documentation the FSF changed from GPL to GFDL,
>> and none of the authors had _any_ say in that).
>>
>> Not assigning copyright helps keep Debian honest.
> Sure; the second option doesn't involve copyright assignment, but
> gives Debian a licence to the work such that it can pick any DFSG Free
> license subject to approval via GR (or whatever) in the future, in
> case we need to relicense the webpages.
As I said, I am not willing to accept what a future GR does to
the freedom of my contributions. I have been running GR's for a while,
and I know how silly some of the winners are. The doc relicensing to
the GFDL by the FSF comes to mind here.
> Of course, MIT/Expat is close enough to such a license that it
> probably doesn't matter.
> How about the following instead, then:
> 1) Copyright assignment to SPI using
> http://ftp.xemacs.org/old-beta/FSF/assign.changes or similar, modified
> to do the assignment to SPI under the direction of Debian.
> -or-
> 2) MIT/Expat license by each contributor.
>> 2 doesn't provide the protection of a copyleft license, but it would
> enable us to use the work in combination with any other license, so
> would be ok.
And kinda draconian. Why are we being so hell bent on
restricting the free license choices for our contributors? As long as
the licenses are free, why dowe feel the need to be in control so much?
Faced with just these choices, I am beginning to feel the urge
to resist anything but GPL v3 for my contributions :)
manoj
--
Half of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@acm.org> <http://www.golden-gryphon.com/>
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