Re: Irony of RSA Encryption

[Paul Serice <serice@bigfoot.com>]

Joseph Carter wrote:
> 
> Paul is a pathetic poor excuse for a wannabe troll.

There is no doubt that if I had it to do all over again I would do it
better.  I have publicly apologized.  Now, I apologize to you
individually.

Perhaps you could walk a little in my shoes.  I would like to know how
you would reconcile the following:

While maintaining "Crafty" a well-regarded chess engine, the author
changed the license because many people were entering it in amateur
chess programming competitions, not as Crafty, but as something they
had written themselves.  According to the author, this was taking the
wind out of many young programmers' sails.

The author of Crafty changed how it was licensed to prevent this
abuse.  My recollection is that the good people on debian-legal
uniformly told me that Crafty was now "non-free" -- in part -- because
it discriminated against persons or fields of endeavor.

The use it discriminated against was something that a good member of
society wouldn't do anyway.

Well several months, maybe years, past before I realized that the GPL
also discriminates against uses: You cannot modify software covered by
the GPL in a proprietary program you redistribute without disclosing
the changes you made.  If you are one of these people, you have to
start from scratch -- which is fine.  Those are the restrictions
placed on the software by its authors, but they are still
restrictions.

The GPL folks say that a good member of society wouldn't do that
anyway -- the same losing argument I used for Crafty.

So, I often ask myself if there is a real difference between the
discriminations outlined above in the Crafty license and those in the
GPL.

Can you offer an insight?

Looking back on the DFSG, with hindsight, my only guess is that DFSG
#3 provides an implicit exception for DFSG #5.  This may work in
spirit, but if you read it, it makes a difference to me that DFSG #3
speaks of things that have to be "allowed," not things that are
"required."  (I've never been too fond of textual arguments though.)


Paul Serice