Re: Leadership, effects on Debian and open source community
On Thu, Dec 03, 1998 at 09:38:16AM -0800, Joseph Carter wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 03, 1998 at 04:30:38AM -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
> > Jules Bean <jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> > > However, unwilling to make apache non-free, we'll probably have to live with
> > > it.
> >
> > Alternatively, we rewrite the DFSG2 so we can grandfather it.
> >
> > This is right if the only merit to arguments against tossing the
> > advertising clause is that we'll discriminate against packages whose
> > authors haven't had sufficient time to consider the new DFSG.
>
> "The BSD advertising clause is not free software. Apache? That's just too
> important, we had to make an exception for it." NO.
>
> I consider the timeout on the BSD advertising clause to be essentially
> license terrorism. Change your license or we'll start calling your program
> non-free! The idea is wrong, the suggested workarounds are even MORE wrong,
> and the whole idea of calling what everyone else in the world considers Free
> Software--and even we did for the past 5 years or so--but it no longer is
> because we decided we didn't LIKE part of the license because it's slightly
> inconvenient and won't let us relicense it as GPL...
>
> It's being done for the wrong reasons in the wrong manner and with almost
> certainly disasterous results.
I have to agree. Restricting further what we consider free is not
something that we can do lightly, and I don't think it's called for
here. Even more so, the current terminology is meaningless; apache is
re-released every few months without a licence change, and they (the
Apache Group) assuredly could if they wished to.
Dan
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