[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: BSD Protection License



On 2003-10-23 11:10:13 +0100 Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
Licenses *grant* the authority to take certain actions; they do not *restrict* one's ability to take actions. I hope you'll agree that

I am aware of this. However, I think that we do not have the ability to distribute derived works under current law unless you grant that to us.

1. You may do X
2. You may do Y
3. You may do Z
means "you may take any, all, or none, of the actions X,Y,Z"; likewise, clauses 2, 3, and 4 each provide alternatives -- you may take actions permitted under any of those clauses.

As already mentioned, your licence says:
2. You may do N
3. You may do X if Y
4. You may do X if Z
which I hope you agree could mean "you may do N; or you may do X if Y and Z." It seems reasonable to ask for clarification.

DFSG 3 is simply a question of understanding what the license says (ok, to be pedantic, what it *trys* to say). Next chance I get, I'll ask one of the fellows here in .ox.ac.uk how such a disjunction would be interpreted by the courts; if he thinks it's unclear, I'll reword the license to change that.

What would you lose by clarifying it anyway? I do not understand why you wish to set this hurdle. I think we are almost certainly not going to be the only people to be confused by this. You would save much time in future explanation by changing it now.

To be fair, I didn't expect many people to like this license -- which is one reason I only came here to discuss it after someone else (Adam Majer) decided he wanted to bring my code into debian.

...and to advocate it?

[...] No trademarks covering licensing, contracts, or any sort of legal services.

Trademarking was not the only concern. Do you have a comment about the morality of misrepresentation as a work from BSD? So far, you have only said that you do not think you will be sued over it, IIRC.

--
MJR/slef     My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ slef@jabber.at
 Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/



Reply to: