Re: Termination clauses, was: Choice of venue

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Brian" == Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu> writes:


    >> If you want to try and formulate the "asymmetry" criterion you
    >> might want to consider the case of a licence L that forced
    >> everyone who distributes a modified version to make their
    >> modifications available under a BSD licence to teachers, or
    >> some other class that may or may not include the original
    >> author. What would be the "same terms" then?

    Brian> Yes, that's either the Charity X case from above, if it
    Brian> requires sending copies to teachers, or... hrm.  I thin
    Brian> it's as non-free as any other Charityware.  That's laudable
nn    Brian> from a social perspective, but it's not Free.
So, how does considering L non-free help our users or the free
software community.  Let's assume that the rights granted by L to all
users are clearly sufficient for a free license.


Actually, at this point, I get stuck constructing an argument.  I want
to say something like let's consider a license L' that requires me to
give my modifications to all users under the BSD license, plus some
other free terms.  I.E. L' requires me to dual license my
modifications.  What does it mean though to require someone to license
their modifications under the BSD license?  The whole point of the BSD
license is that you don't have to give your modifications to some
people and you can charge consideration and only give people binaries.
That's fundamentally incompatible with requiring people to license
modifications to everyone.

I'm torn.  I think it is reasonably free to give one class of people
more rights than another provided that all people are given sufficient
rights for the work to be free.  The only case where this seems
problematic is if an obligation is created for you to give people
source code or to admit that you have some modification or something
like that--if you get in a situation that violates the dissident test.
It seems like a license that requires you to give some party
additional rights does no harm if you're never obligated to interact
with that party or let them know they have those rights.  However it
seems important for there to be a single license that from the
standpoint of the free software community covers the entire work.
Asymmetries seem problematic because they would be problematic if you
wanted to fork the work or the original author was unavailable.

I feel like you ought to be able to construct a license like L that
gives a class of people more rights and to have this license be free.
I'm failing to make the constructions of such a license work out, but
the failures seem to be structural rather than inherent.  I do tend to
agree with you that the QPL does not allow the work to be distributed
under the same licenses as the modifications.  I do think that is
problematic from a DFSG standpoint.

If you believe that I'm wrong and giving one class of users more
rights should be non-free from a moral standpoint, please explain why.
What freedom would we be denying our users?


--Sam