On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Brian T. Sniffen wrote: > The license clearly allows you to derive works, as long as you do not > change the SRFI itself. The above sentence is in conflict with itself. A deriviative work must necessarily change the SRFI itself. The end product might not be an SRFI anymore, but the starting point is. It's as much in conflict as the following: "Here is a piece of code. You can modify it, but you must not change it." This is, in a nutshell, the entire problem with this license. It gives with one hand, and then takes with the other, leaving the exact amount taken open to interpretation in court. > Well, calling a derivative work of SRFI 86 "SRFI 86", or otherwise > making something that appears to be a modified SRFI 86 would probably > count. I can't see anything else as forbidden. I agree that is quite likely what they mean, but that's not what the license says, at least at a conservative reading. One would have hoped that the presence of a FAQ about this section would have alerted the license authors that this section of the license was extreemly unclear. > Is your real problem, Don, the vagueness of the identity problem for > documents? When is one document the same as another? When is one a > modification of another, and not a separate document? That's part and parcel of the issue. If the license clarified when a derivation ceased to be the "document itself" and became a totally different document, this license might possibly become acceptable, but they fail to do that. [Frankly, I'd much rather see this section rewritten along the lines I proposed earlier in this thread than definition clarification.] Don Armstrong -- Miracles had become relative common-places since the advent of entheogens; it now took very unusual circumstances to attract public attention to sightings of supernatural entities. The latest miracle had raised the ante on the supernatural: the Virgin Mary had manifested herself to two children, a dog, and a Public Telepresence Point. -- Bruce Sterling, _Holy Fire_ p228 http://www.donarmstrong.com http://www.anylevel.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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