Re: gif2png in non-free?
On 15 Jul 1999, Henning Makholm wrote:
> Remco Blaakmeer <remco-blaakmeer@quicknet.nl> writes:
>
> > I think that "permission to (...) for any purpose and without fee is
> > hereby granted" is very different from "permission to (...) is hereby
> > granted without fee".
Another often-used phrase is "permission to (...) for any purpose with or
without fee is hereby granted", which is OK because it explicitly states
"with or without fee".
> Yes .. but the author might have meant it to be parsed as
> "permission .. without fee is herby granted", i.e. that "without fee"
> applies to the permission and states that said permission does not
> depend on a fee being paid to the author.
Yes, this may very wel be the case. But it should be changed, then.
> In any case, the wording is ambiguous and deserves to be cleared up.
Indeed. But for the clarification, the author of the program needs to be
contacted.
> > I'm sure this subject has come up before.
>
> Certainly. That ambiguous wording is amazingly popular. I imagine
> people thinking, "gee, that looks utterly incomprehensible so it
> must be really bulletproof legalese .. I think I'll snatch up that
> phrase for my own license."
Well, what can be done about it? Find every license in Debian containing
this ambiguous phrase and contact whoever wrote the software? File
(wishlist) bugs against these packages? This can become a huge amount of
work, but I would be willing to help send e-mail messages to the authors
and respond to their questions if the maintainers of the packages in
question are too busy to do that.
Remco
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