On Wed, 10 Mar 2004, Jeremy Hankins wrote: > Don Armstrong <don@donarmstrong.com> writes: > > The interesting part of the claim in a summary isn't that > restrictions on modifying make a license non-free, but that the > license restricts modifying. The summary doesn't describe the DFSG, > it describes the license. Obviously. But in describing a specific case, it's rather trivial to say "This section restricts modification (DFSG §3)." This allows others reading your arguments to recognize their foundations. > You think that the sections of the DFSG provide a useful taxonomy of > non-free licenses? In some circumstances, yes. By seeing which clauses of the DFSG are in violation, it becomes much easier for our ftp-masters to see if there is something in the license that would restrict the work from being able to even be redistributed in non-free, as an example. Additionally, it helps others who are attempting to interpret the DFSG to see licenses which have preiviously failed sections of it and understand the line between Free and non-free. > That would be very surprising, as I don't believe it was written > with that in mind. Works often end up in more than the role they were designed for. > I guess we'd have to do a survey of licenses in order to have hard > data to support or deny this idea. But my sense (based on my > experience reading d-l) is that useful categories of license tend to > be largely orthogonal to the way the DFSG is split into sections. > Licenses don't tend to neatly and simply fail some section of the > DFSG. No, they usually tend to fail multiple sections, and get all sorts of things wrong, some of which aren't even included in the DFSG. > I think that the idea that the DFSG neatly and simply captures the > ways that licenses can be non-free is very much tied to the idea > that the DFSG could be used as a definition. Obviously. But we're not talking about "capturing" here. If your contention that a license is not free is based upon the DFSG, it should state so. > > There are licenses which violate specific sections of the DFSG. We > > can use that information to compare licenses and become better at > > interpreting the clauses of the DFSG in an appropriate manner. > > Can you give an example, or provide more detail? When I'm examining licenses that have a strange set of wording, and seem to fail a particular portion of the DFSG, I often want to go back and look through the discussion of other licenses with similar terms that have also failed the DFSG. That allows me to say "licence Foo has a clause with the same net effect as license Bar which we found violated DFSG §6 for the reasons we delinated in [debian-legal thread]" Don Armstrong -- Any excuse will serve a tyrant. -- Aesop http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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