On Mon, Jun 10, 2002 at 09:04:40AM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote: > DFSG requires that distributors be free to charge MORE than just > 'material costs'; they must also be free to sell CDs at a profit. Yes, > this license fails the DFSG. No, the DFSG doesn't require that. The DFSG says: "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. The license may not require a royalty or other fee for such sale." Therefore: A license which forbade selling the software by itself, but permitted selling it in aggregate with other software, would abide by the letter of the DFSG. Of course, in the real world no one licenses software this way because it's trivially easy to aggregate the software. The GNU GPL places a restriction (more specifically, a ceiling) on the price that may be charged for source code corresponding to a binary software release that has already been made. DFSG #1 has nothing to say about that. I won't opine on whether or not it *should*. -- G. Branden Robinson | I have a truly elegant proof of the Debian GNU/Linux | above, but it is too long to fit branden@debian.org | into this .signature file. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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