On Tue, Mar 18, 2003 at 01:14:30PM -0500, Don Armstrong wrote: > I agree that we should be promoting freedom. However, I don't think > that our licenses need to promote freedom, so long as they don't > restrict it. That is, I don't think I'll ever see the day where we > decide not to package BSD or X licensed software merely because it > fails to promote freedom. [If that indeed was the point you were > driving at... perhaps I've misunderstood what you were getting at when > you used "promote".] If you inferred that I was planning to argue that the BSD or MIT/X11 licenses should be construed as non-DFSG-free, you inferred incorrectly. You apparently ascribe a lot more side effects to the phrase "promoting freedom" than I do. > > The job of a copyright license is to *grant permissions*. > > And often to restrict them, as is the case in the GPL (linking, etc.), No. What sort of "linking" isn't already restricted under copyright law? The alternative to a software license isn't the public domain. It's "All Rights Reserved." > and many "no warranty" clauses. That's a different area of law entirely (and, in the U.S., one that's almost always litigated at the state level, rather than federally as copyright is). The context of the discussion is copyright licenses. If you want to start a thread about the threat to freedom that disclaimers of warranty pose, then please do so -- but IMO it's not germane to this one. -- G. Branden Robinson | The noble soul has reverence for Debian GNU/Linux | itself. branden@debian.org | -- Friedrich Nietzsche http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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