On Sun, Apr 25, 2004 at 07:29:57PM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote: > To veer off the subject a little, we don't like licenses which engage > in too much contract-like behavior, because they're usually non-free. > In particular, any license which requires that you agree to it in > order to *use* it -- since use is not normally restricted by copyright > law -- is trying to be a contract, and is also non-free. Indeed. Larry Rosen, who is an attorney and is the legal advisor to the Board of the Open Source Initiative[1], is a major advocate of converting copyright licenses into contracts[2], as are major media[3] and proprietary software[4][5] companies. I personally think this explains a great many of the divergences between Debian's assessment of licenses and OSI's. [1] http://opensource.org/docs/board.php [2] http://www.rosenlaw.com/html/GL19.pdf [3] http://www.ipjustice.org/321/321Studios.pdf [4] http://www.cyber.com.au/cyber/about/comparing_the_gpl_to_eula.pdf [5] http://www.gripe2ed.com/scoop/story/2003/10/18/115821/71 -- G. Branden Robinson | If a man ate a pound of pasta and a Debian GNU/Linux | pound of antipasto, would they branden@debian.org | cancel out, leaving him still http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | hungry? -- Scott Adams
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