On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 05:15:58PM -0500, David Turner wrote:
> *speaking as an FSF employee, but not stating an official position of
> the foundation*
>
> I just got out of a meeting on how to clean up (2)(c). No guarantees,
> but I'm working for it. Our initial thought is to move from normal
> startup to something like -v.
This is perfectly fine with me, but *please* don't let the new (2)(c) go
into a whole lot of detail about how *exactly* the content must be
presented.
That is, I have a pipe dream about standardizing the --version outputs
of commands such that you can always suck out the upstream version with:
foo --version | head -1 | awk '{print $2}'
In other words, it's fine to mandate that the material of interest be
presented in some human-comprehensible format[1] (provided they speak the
language :) ), but please don't specify a format in the license.
> This would be non-cluttering, but would retain the various good
> effects of (2)(c), which include stroking authors' egos, letting users
> know about Free Software, and keeping copyright strings in the program
> binaries (which is how most of our license violations are found).
I am entirely in sympathy with these goals. They all promote a vibrant
commons of software:
1) the individual can be made aware of the existence and nature of the
commons
2) the individual is provided with an incentive to participate
3) abusers/appropriators of the commons can be identified
> OTOH, the Affero bit is staying AFAIK, and I hope that Debian can accept
> that. We had a discussion on proper interpretation of #3 brewing, and I
> would be happy for it to brew some more (although I'll have to take off
> my FSF hat, of course).
Can you explicate to the list what the "Affero bit" is?
[1] There is an XML elephant in the room, but I'll ignore it if you will.
--
G. Branden Robinson | I suspect Linus wrote that in a
Debian GNU/Linux | complicated way only to be able to
branden@debian.org | have that comment in there.
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Lars Wirzenius
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