Re: OpenDivX license
On Tue, 23 Jan 2001, Brian Ristuccia wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 01:31:12PM -0800, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> > On Tue, 23 Jan 2001, Brian Ristuccia wrote:
> > > It's not an open source license. Term #6 places limitations on distributing
> > > modified copies.
> >
> > la CSS, then it would not be OSD-conformant. But if, reductio ad
> > absurdum, the standard said simply, "the software must communicate on port
> > 80", that wouldn't violate the DFSG.
> >
>
> It certainly would.
>
> Not only does term #6 prohibit me from distributing copies modified in this
> way, it actually goes as far as trying to prevent me from making such
> changes in the first place.
Look, I didn't say it was a good thing. I simply said it doesn't violate
the DFSG, as best I can tell - and I mostly bring this up to ask whether
or not this is a hole in the DFSG and/or OSD that can be plugged, and
secondarily whether people think that tying standards conformance to
distribution rights is a good thing or not.
> If the program in your reductio ad absurdum
> argument were Apache, and the copyright holder would accuse me of breech of
> contract for modifying the software to listen on a different port and accuse
> me of copyright infringement if I distributed that modified version, we'd
> all agree that minimum, such a term like #6 in the so-called OpenDivX
> license violates DFSG #3.
"Must allow" doesn't mean "Must allow unconditionally". The OpenDiVX
license allows modifications and derived works, it's just that those
modifications must adhere to a specific set of standards.
DFSG #4 gets closer: it says that the license has to allow someone to be
able to distribute a patch that, say in the above example, replaces the
hard-coded port 80 with another port, "with the source code" - I don't
know if that means mere aggregation on a CDROM and/or in a similar
directory on a web site, or if it can be a part of the .tgz, etc.
I don't like this any more than you do. It's ugly. But to fix it you
have to make a blanket statement about what the license can say about what
the code implements - and I'd really be interested in a way to do that
that doesn't similarly affect the GPL, at least as interpreted by Stallman
when he came after L. Peter Deutsch regarding linking to readline's API
from Ghostscript.
Brian
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