On Mon, Oct 30, 2000 at 08:44:55AM +0000, Colin Watson wrote: > 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. Maybe it should be. Last time I researched the MPL/NPL issue, I thought the NPL was non-free, and the MPL (barely) free. Maybe I misremember. > >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. You're not thinking adventurously enough with respect to the types of code that people might attempt to combine with UW-IMAP. It appears that UWash might be attempting to claim some sort of transitive copyright in, say GPL-licensed code that is patched into UW-IMAP by someone who isn't a legal scholar. Definitely not a good-neighbor policy. -- G. Branden Robinson | The first thing the communists do when Debian GNU/Linux | they take over a country is to outlaw branden@debian.org | cockfighting. http://www.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Oklahoma State Senator John Monks
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