Re: New license for UW-IMAP

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> wrote:
>On Sat, Oct 28, 2000 at 12:36:22AM -0400, Jaldhar H. Vyas wrote:
>> (5) the University of Washington may make modifications to the
>> Distribution that are substantially similar to modified versions of
>> the Distribution, and may make, use, sell, copy, distribute, publicly
>> display, and perform such modifications, including making such
>> modifications available under this or other licenses, without
>> obligation or restriction;
>
>BZZT! WRONG!  This says that they may steal your changes and take them
>proprietary ("other licenses, without...restriction"), even if they are
>novel enough to be independently copyrightable.

Er, hang on. Isn't this similar to the restrictions in the NPL?
www.mozilla.org is giving me 502s, so I can't check directly, but in an
essay by Bruce Perens on the DFSG/OSD he says:

  An important feature of the NPL is that it contains special privileges
  that apply to Netscape and nobody else. It gives Netscape the
  privilege of re-licensing modifications that you've made to their
  software. They can take those modifications private, improve them, and
  refuse to give you the result.

To me, this looks like a fair summary of the UW licence too. The NPL is
a pain in many ways, and it's certainly GPL-incompatible, but
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html acknowledges it as a
free software licence. Thus, simply allowing a privileged party to steal
your changes and make them proprietary is not sufficient to render a
licence non-DFSG-free.

>I urge the Debian community to reject this license; it looks to me like it
>might fail DFSG #9.

"License Must Not Contaminate Other Software"? Really? I think it would
be a strange interpretation of a "Distribution" of UW-IMAP that extended
to other Debian packages.

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]