Re: New CUPS license violates DFSG 6?
Wichert Akkerman <wichert@wiggy.net>:
> Previously Peter Makholm wrote:
> > I think there are consensus for allowing positive discrimination.
>
> There is? That would be a mighty slippery slope.
If the existence of such an exception made software non-free, then
DFSG-free software could be made non-free by the author at any time,
and we would have to keep checking every five minutes that this hasn't
happened. I assume you don't want that, so are you suggesting that the
Debian diff should remove all mention of the exception? Presumably
that is possible, in this case, by the GPL. In other cases, you might
not be allowed to remove the discrimating part of the licence, but you
could make it part of official Debian policy to gratuitously modify
the source in such cases, for example by adding a bad haiku composed
by the release manager, where the modification has a more restrictive
but non-disciminating licence. But you probably wouldn't want to do
that either, would you?
I've always interpreted DFSG 6 as one of those annoying clauses
(international human rights documents are full of them) that doesn't
really add a condition but merely makes it clear that the other
conditions must be true without (a certain kind of) exception.
Edmund
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