On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 03:55:48PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
> > That discriminates against people with money in their bank accounts.
> > The tax return thing probably discriminates against people who pay
> > tax. Personally, I'm happy to let the tax thing fail the "Trivially
> > stupid" test.
> The point of the tax thing is precisely that it *is* obviously bogus,
> but that any attempt to show *why* it's bogus would also show that a
> forced-distribution requirement is also bogus.
Sorry, but it's not. Sending your tax return, or your latest entries
in your diary, or whatever, to someone random and sending your changes
to some program to its author aren't comparable. One's never sensible
or reasonable, the latter's a good thing that we'd want to encourage
independent of whether it's required by the license. [0] And I think it's
clear that we'd definitely like people to send their changes back to us,
or their users, or the original author, or whoever's interested in it.
If I'm working from the assumptions that "A is reasonable. B is
unreasonable." you're not going to get anywhere with an argument that
just blithely assumes "A is like B." -- as far as I'm concerned, they're
patently _unlike_.
Seriously, you're welcome to hate the clause all you like; there are
people out there who hate BSD licensing and others who hate GPL licensing.
You do need something stronger than a firm opinion and a lot of repetition
to declare it non-free, though.
Cheers,
aj
[0] For comparison most of the restrictions we allow in licenses are
things we'd encourage anyway if they weren't there -- patch files are
just to make tracability easier, which is a good thing; changelogs,
licenses announcements just make it clearer what's happened and what's
possible, distributing source is the sort of thing we want to encourage,
and so on.
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``Dear Anthony Towns: [...] Congratulations --
you are now certified as a Red Hat Certified Engineer!''
Attachment:
pgp0ZVipB40jm.pgp
Description: PGP signature