Re: Question about the old BSD license and GPL (gtkipmsg)
On Thu, Jun 21, 2001 at 11:12:58AM -0400, Chloe Hoffman wrote:
> If we're talking about enforcement of copyright in a court of law, then I
> would note, as summarized by Eugene Volokh
> (http://www.law.ucla.edu/faculty/volokh/copyinj.htm#IIA):
>
> In Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises,91 the Supreme
> Court made clear that copyright law is substantively constitutional:
> the First Amendment does not shield speech that infringes another's
> copyright.92 Copyright, the Court said, is itself an "engine of free
> expression" because it "supplies the economic incentive to create and
> disseminate ideas."93
Bleah.
Ok, if the advertising clause in enforcable, then I think we've got
a problem.
We declare (in the social contract) that the BSD license is a DFSG
license. To my knowledge, we don't have any mechanism in place to meet
the advertising requirement of the original BSD license (nor that of
similar licenses, such as Apache).
If what you're saying is correct, I see several choices:
[1] Modify Debian policy and procedures so that we have an "advertising
boilerplate" for every distribution, with a line for every package which
has an advertising clause. [Lots of work.]
[2] Modify the DFSG (so that it specifies the modified BSD license in
the example of DFSG licenses, and indicates that requiring people to
do extra work not normally associated with handling of software is just
as bad as requiring payment of a fee) and remove the offending packages
from the distribution. [Lots of work, lots of time.]
[3] Pretend that what we're doing is perfectly legal and wait for the
eventual explosion. [Disgusting]
[4] Convince every author of such software to change their license.
[Lots of work, lots of time, may not be doable.]
--
Raul
Reply to: