Re: reiser4 non-free?
Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu> writes:
> Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com> writes:
>> A: No, credits describe the contribution made to a project. Ads
>> describe a product someone wants you to buy. Ads are not the same as
>> credits, and their preservation is not protected by this license.
>
> Debian's going to have to look really, really closely at every release
> of every piece of software under this license, then, and risk an
> argument -- in a courtroom -- with a copyright holder who considers
> some line to be a credit, or insufficiently prominent in its modified
> form.
Fuzzy lines in a license are not a new thing. Debian isn't in the
litigation business, so we're not going to be trying to push the
boundaries anyway. Respecting the wishes of the author/licensor is a
policy of ours -- remember the pine business.
>> Q: What in this license prevents persons from making their name
>> display excessively annoyingly throughout the running of the program?
>> Isn't that a flaw in the license?
>>
>> A: The shovel doesn't stop the digger from creating a pit in the road
>> that endangers other people. The license is a tool. Whether you make
>> an ass out of yourself using it on the software you write is up to
>> you. No compiler makes broken programs work....
>
> In other words, some works under this license are free (for example,
> one containing no credits but the copyright notice) and others are
> non-free.
Wouldn't such a work still be non-free? At the least, it definitely
goes much farther than the analogous clause in the GPL. You can't
include code (even optionally executed code) to suppress it, for
example.
--
Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
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