Re: Darwin?

[Ethan Benson <erbenson@alaska.net>]

On Sat, Feb 26, 2000 at 05:32:30PM +0100, Filip Van Raemdonck wrote:
> 
> * The fact that it says that you have to announce to Apple any
> modifications you make
> * The fact that you have to do this even if you only use it internally,
> not for R&D
> 
> I did this before I got your message, en when reading the page you sent
> me, I'm not really sure on the way RMS interpretes the termination clause
> - AFAICS you *can* fight patents yourself:
> (last sentence of section 9.1)
> "If Apple suspends ... nothing in this License shall be construed to
> restrict You ... from independently negotiating for necessary rights ..."

I would have to look at this again, but as someone who has watched the
whole miserable Apple saga for the last several years, I would stay
far away from anything with the slightest smell of terminiation
clause, as apple would have no problems litigating anyone they wish
out of existence. 

> I won't argue about the other two though.

the other two on their own are enough for me to consider the licence
non-free.

> All that aside, the OSD says it *is* an opensource license, and IIRC,
> everything which complies with the OSD (except for QPL) should also be
> DFSG-compliant, so technically it shouldn't be a problem to base a
> distribution on this (even though I am not sure I'd still want to).

remember opensource != Free software (though often times so called
`opensource' licences are Free, i don't think this is the case here)

while the OSD and the DFSG seem to be identical (at least last i
checked) I think its up to debian to interpret for themselves the
freeness of a licence rather then accept the `opensource' folk's
interpretation which IMO is sometimes flawed (as in this case and
especially for APSL 1.0 which they also considered `opensource')

-- 
Ethan Benson