On Mon, Jun 10, 2002 at 11:34:05AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > 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." If you're only allowed to charge material costs, you're not selling the software: you're giving the software away and recouping the costs of media. > 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*. The license in question does not distinguish between selling of source and selling of binaries; it says only "redistribution of this utility", which, erring on the side of caution, means you can't charge for copies of either source or binaries beyond what it costs you to distribute them; and there does not seem to be a provision for distributing htp in aggregate with other software. Perhaps a distributor with a skilled accountant would itemize the prices charged for each piece of software on the CD, and the service of bundling them, to show that nothing was charged for htp beyond material costs, but this seems scant protection. In any case, I think this comes down to a question of licensing confusion on the part of upstream; the first sentence of the licensing text in /usr/share/doc/htp/ref/intro.htm states, "htp is a public domain utility." I suspect simply clarifying this inconsistent license with upstream would indisputably satisfy the DFSG. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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