Don Armstrong wrote: > On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, Josh Triplett wrote: > >>a more carefully written requirement that source must be distributed >>and freedoms given to the *users* of a piece of software still seems >>reasonable to me. > > I want to think it is reasonable as well, but I haven't yet been able > to articulate a method of doing this that is not onerous and > needlessly restricts where a work can be used. > > So, in theory, I think I agree, but I have yet to find a real live > license clause that was sanely worded that actually did this without > restricting things that make the license non free. > > All the attempts that I've seen (and made myself) so far have had > rather serious problems. Agreed. This is offtopic for this thread, but I think that any such clause would need to be very general about *how* to distribute source. Every requirement I have seen that attempts to cover this area always seems to specify too much about how the software is distributed (like Affero and HTTP). A Free requirement would be more along the lines of the GPL's "medium customarily used for software interchange", except modified to allow distribution via any reasonable medium, whether tangible media or network distribution. This would cover the "what about tiny embedded systems" objection, since the medium of transmission does _not_ need to be the same as the medium over which the software itself is used. (If we continue this, we should probably do so in a new thread.) - Josh Triplett
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