On Tue, Oct 31, 2000 at 11:23:36AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > I've found myself thinking on similar lines in the past: especially > this is where all the FooCorp Public Licenses tend to go off the rails, > insisting on how incredibly much more important FooCorp is than every > other contributor, and that they're privacy and intellectual property > is theirs and must be carefully protected, and who cares about any other > contributor anyway. Quite. > But on the other hand, there's a clause along the same lines (speaking > very generally) in the BSD license: everyone needs to protect the > University of California's reputation and name, who cares about anyone > else. [0] I assume you're talking about the "non-" advertising clause, the one the Regents didn't retract: 3. Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. I always analyzed this along the following lines: a free software author is licensing his *software* freely, not his name, likeness, or other personally identifiable characteristics. After all, if one becomes a celebrity these stature of Michael Jordan (or even of Linus Torvalds), this is clearly something of independent value. Linus probably wouldn't appreciate it if some proprietary embedded device using the Linux kernel came out, complete with a picture of him on the box saying "It's Grrrrrrrreat!". I never really saw this as an onerous limitation because it's pretty orthogonal to the things most people try to do with software. > I see the DFSG as guaranteeing minimal rights to everyone, basically the > ability to keep the code in the public and fix it and improve it. As long > as all this stuff is allowed, I don't think it really concerns the DFSG > if some people can do even more than this (the BSD license lets everyone > take the software away from the public and make proprietry improvements, > for example). > > One possible way of looking at this would be to say that allowing some > people to make the software proprietry is discriminating against everyone > who isn't allowed to make the software proprietry (thus failing point 6). Yeah, I can live with that interpretation. > By this way of looking at things, the MPL, NPL and QPL would probably fail > the DFSG, iirc. [1] I personally wouldn't lose any sleep over this. The progenitors of the Alphabet-Soup Public License, Mozilla, have made clear their intentions to dual-license Mozilla itself[1]. It's very difficult to read this as a ringing endorsement of the MPL itself. Similarly, TrollTech is claiming that their revenues have gone up since they dual-licensed Qt under the GPL[2]. I don't think it is a coincidence that the traditional and popular free software licenses have come from academic environments (the MIT and BSD licenses directly so, and the GPL and LGPL indirectly, as Richard Stallman's manner of trying to embody his notion of the traditional hacker ethic at MIT in the ungainly guise of a copyright license). Corporations, with their sole responsibility to shareholder profit, find it extremely difficult to avoid doing a disservice to any community not solely comprised of their own shareholders. [1] www.mozilla.org [2] www.linuxtoday.com, recently -- G. Branden Robinson | The key to being a Southern Baptist: Debian GNU/Linux | It ain't a sin if you don't get caught. branden@debian.org | -- Anthony Davidson http://www.debian.org/~branden/ |
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