On Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 05:16:16PM -0400, Brian T. Sniffen wrote: [...] > if you don't buy that, at least consider the original argument: that a > restriction in addition to those imposed by copyright law is > necessarily non-free. We don't uphold this principle in practice. DFSG #4 explicitly allows the sort of "poor man's trademark" restriction that is exercised by the Apache license. At one point I considered writing a critique of the Apache license for this reason, but figured it would just provoke flameage and not much in the way of serious consideration. Besides, a statement like "any restriction beyond that imposed by copyright law is non-free" necessitatates that we answer the question "which copyright law?". I think we're better off with the broad-principles-combined-with-specific-tests approach that I believe is (imperfectly) exemplified by our current Social Contract and DFSG. -- G. Branden Robinson | Debian GNU/Linux | "Bother," said Pooh, as he was branden@debian.org | assimilated by the Borg. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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