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Re: FWD: Bug#121916: analog should be in non-free



I am the upstream author for analog. Sorry, I'm getting into this discussion
a bit late, because I've been away on holiday. I'll try and cover everything
in this mail.

First, I'm already subscribed to debian-legal, so please stop Cc:'ing me.
Thanks.

The general point first. Joey Hess wrote:
> It seems we have to question this license from time to time. I wish it was
> somthing better understood like the GPL. [...] Stephen, have you even
> thought about dual-licensing analog under some other, probably generally
> more restrictive, license like the GPL?

Well, in many ways I wish I had gone with the GPL initially, and in many
ways I'm glad I didn't. I dislike certain aspects of the GPL (which I don't
think it's profitable to get into at the moment), which is why I didn't use
it. However, I do think licence proliferation is bad for the community, and
so if I were starting now, I might swallow my pride and go with the GPL
anyway. (Analog is quite old by now, 6.5 years this week. In those days, I
didn't realise how bad licence proliferation was. I'm not sure anybody was
as clear on that as they are now, with the explosion of open, semi-open and
pretending-to-be-open licences that we've seen in the mean time.)

The question of whether to change now to the GPL, or dual with GPL, is
different though, and I don't think it can be done. I would have to contact
all the contributing authors. But more seriously, analog includes code from
libraries under BSD-style licences with copyright clauses, which are not
GPL-compatible. (No, I can't just depend on the libraries being installed
and link to them, because analog is supposed to be OS-independent.)

Now to the specific point. As a reminder, the section being objected to
reads:
> You may not charge for the program itself, only for reasonable costs of
> distributing the program, and you must not do anything to suggest to the
> person to whom it is distributed that analog is anything other than free
> software. Furthermore, you may not charge for distributing a modified
> version of the program unless the source code for the modified version, or
> a list of differences between the modified version and the original
> version, is publicly and freely available in machine readable form.

And the DFSG section 1 reads:
> The license of a Debian component may not restrict any party from selling
> or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software
> distribution containing programs from several different sources.

I think that the original complaint, and some of the responses, are missing
the point. It is explicitly permitted to charge someone for sending them the
program, and "reasonable" does not specify any limit. This seems to satisfy
the DFSG perfectly well to me.

However, I take Branden's point:
> I'm not sure how meaningful that statement [...] even is. What does it
> mean to charge for a program if you're NOT distributing it?

If you're still not convinced (is there any consensus on this?), I'm willing
to change the first sentence to:
> You may charge for distributing the program, but you must not do anything
> to suggest to the person to whom it is distributed that analog is anything
> other than free software.

I actually don't think that this changes the meaning at all, but I do think
that it weakens the emphasis.

BTW, at the risk of starting another flamewar, does this list concur with
Joey that the second sentence is OK?

-- 
Stephen Turner, Cambridge, UK    http://homepage.ntlworld.com/adelie/stephen/
"This is Henman's 8th Wimbledon, and he's only lost 7 matches." BBC, 2/Jul/01



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