On Mon, Jun 10, 2002 at 06:56:00PM +0200, Ralf Treinen wrote: > On Mon, Jun 10, 2002 at 11:34:05AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > > 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. > > True. However, the licence in question says: > > No charge can be incurred for the redistribution of this utility > beyond material costs. > > Which I read as applying to aggregations, too. I agree. My intention was to correct what I regarded as Steve Langasek's misstatement regarding what the DFSG says. If either the license itself, or the copyright holder's claimed interpretation of that license, violates the DFSG, then the software is not DFSG-free. See the University of Washington for an example of an entity that takes a DFSG-free license and "interprets" in a non-DFSG-free way. Thus, Pine is non-free. > > 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. > > According to my reading, the clause in the GPL doesn't forbid a company > to sell you the service of distributing the software to you. Until you distribute software, the GPL has nothing to say at all about money. Even then, it only talks about money if you fail to distribute source code. > That is, the company might make profit from selling this service to. Certainly. I can think of several possibilities where underlying source code might be DFSG-free, but money can still be made selling it as a service. Sometimes the value isn't as much in the source code itself, as it is in other things, like raw computing horsepower, massive volumes of storage, access to data sets, or the consultation of experts. Think, for example, of large search engines, MMORPGs, or viscous flow simulators. (In the latter case, inputs to the simulator might be so highly parameterized, or the software so persnickety, that even PhDs in fluid dynamics need the help of the lab geeks to translate their requirements into simulatorese.) > The htp licence in question forbids this. The one-sentence quote in the bug report doesn't give me enough information to substantiate this assertion, but if you're right, then I would say that the software is not DFSG-free. -- G. Branden Robinson | To Republicans, limited government Debian GNU/Linux | means not assisting people they branden@debian.org | would sooner see shoveled into mass http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | graves. -- Kenneth R. Kahn
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