Re: Knuth statement on renaming cm files and Licence violation.
kaih@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen) writes:
> > DFSG says that you have to permit modification. (By patches or
> > directly.) That is violated by a rule like "if you modify this, you
> > must chant the kama sutra" or "if you modify this, you cannot name the
> > output file foo.bar".
>
> It is not actually clear to me that this is violated by any of the example
> rules.
Well, what about "if you modify this, you must pay a licensing fee"?
The point is that modifications must be practically unrestricted. If
this was not clear to you before, I hope it is now.
> > The reason the latter is crucial is because it
> > is an *operational* matter for the software, changing such things as
> > APIs is exactly why we want the right to modify files.
>
> And we usually get upset if a library changes its API without changing its
> soname or versioning its symbols. *Because* this is an operational matter.
Right. Such a change is an unfriendly one, and one we don't do. But
it's also crucial to freedom that we have the right to do it, because
someday it may be the only way to fix a bug.
> This is insane.
Well, how friendly!
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