Re: "Waqf" General Public License in Debian?
On Fri, 2 Jul 2010, Christoph Anton Mitterer <calestyo@scientia.net> wrote:
> 3) The license contains many places which can be considered
> discriminatory, racist or fundamentalist.
> Apart from that... religious stuff shouldn't go into a license.
http://www.ojuba.org/wiki/waqf/license
The above URL has the license. I think that the concepts in the preamble are
interesting, offering software to please Allah and denying the concept of
"ownership" of Intellectual Property.
# The user may use the work for any good purpose and he may not use it to harm
# others or violate the permissive principles of Islam 7). Notice that any
# work that is most likely harmful can't be put under Waqf in the first place
So how am I supposed to know the "permissive principles of Islam"? Does such
a thing really exist? I wouldn't be surprised to find that if you randomly
selected a dozen Muslims you would find little agreement on what this is. We
can't have fuzzy licenses. I don't inherently disagree with religiously
inspired lincenses, but such a license should have a short clear list of what
it prohibits.
Also as we don't discriminate against fields of endeavor the "good purpose"
part wouldn't be acceptable even if it could be clearly defined and agreed.
If Stormfront, Al Quaeda, or Right to Life want to use Debian then as a matter
of principle we should let them do so - but of course the members of such
organisations think that they have a "good purpose" so it probably doesn't
matter much.
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