Re: Leadership, effects on Debian and open source community
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> wrote:
> "The BSD advertising clause is not free software. Apache? That's just too
> important, we had to make an exception for it." NO.
Even if the exception is no timeout?
> 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...
Eh, you haven't addressed the potential complexity of distributing
"free" software if a thousand different people start creating
software with advertising clauses.
> It's being done for the wrong reasons in the wrong manner and with
> almost certainly disasterous results.
And this is almost pure rhetoric -- which does nothing towards
addressing all the problems.
Here's my next contribution: Assuming we permit software with advertising
clauses in Debian, we must be responsible for creating the cannonical
"Debian with Advertising Clauses" text, which anyone advertising Debian
must reproduce in all their ads (they may come up with their own text,
in which case they're clearly assuming legal responsibility for this
issue). Currently, we're lax in this regard (which means we're possibly
contributing to copyright violation).
I've not yet decided one way or the other about the general goodness of
the advertising clause. My focus is on making the arguments for each
side make sense.
--
Raul
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