Re: Is the Sun RPC License DFSG-free?
On Fri, 2003-08-22 at 17:28, Branden Robinson wrote:
> > Users may copy or modify Sun RPC
> > without charge, but are not authorized to license or
> > distribute it to anyone else except as part of a product or
> > program developed by the user.
>
> This violates DFSG 1 and arguably DFSG 5.
>
> It might skate through DFSG 1's backwards-bent wording if the sentence
> stopped at "part of a product or program".
I believe that the above paragraph, minus the last four words, is
DFSG-free, since it doesn't actually restrict what you can do. See the
discussion on the Bitstream Vera font license for more discussion on
this.
> But it doesn't stop there. You can't redistribute this code unless you
> develop with it. This requires distributors to be software developers,
> not ordinary joes who've never written a line of code in their lives.
However, with the last four words included, it seems to say that you
must write some form of a program yourself (and then throw in the RPC
code) in order to distribute the RPC code to anybody else, which fails
DFSG 5 as Branden mentioned.
--
Joe Drew <hoserhead@woot.net> <drew@debian.org>
My weblog doesn't detail my personal life: http://me.woot.net
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