Francesco Poli wrote: > On Sun, 27 Jun 2004 07:08:11 +0100 Lewis Jardine wrote: >>3: Does applying a Free term to a subset of people discriminate >>against them? > > I'm undecided about this. > > My first feeling is that it would still be a discrimination. > Why do some people get more rights just by belonging to a group, or by > living in a particular place? > > Imagine the following: > > "You can redistribute this work and/or modify it under the terms of the > GNU General Public License, version 2, as published by the Free Software > Foundation. > As en exception, if you are a king, you can redistribute and/or modify > it under the terms of the X11 license." > > This seems unfair. > > But, OTOH, the copyright holder could distribute the work under the GPL > to one person and then distribute the same work under the X11 license to > a different person (and even distribute the same work under a > proprietary license to a third person). > This is perfectly fine (the copyright holder has the right to relicense > as she likes) and it wouldn't undermine the freeness of the > free-licensed versions. > > So, I don't know... > > What do you think? As long as the license is Free for all recipients, and the license does not attempt to restrict the use of the versions to _only_ those groups (for example, "Only $GROUP may use this under the GPL; others may not, even if they get a copy from someone in that group"), then the license is Free. See also section 12e of the DFSG FAQ at http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html . - Josh Triplett
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature