Re: Summary : ocaml, QPL and the DFSG.
Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <edmundo@rano.org> wrote:
>Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk>:
>> Why should free software support companies in not releasing their
>> knowledge to the world? Why do we consider the freedom to hoard
>> information an important one?
>
>I'm not sure we do, and this is somewhat off-topic, but:
>
>- The information in question will be made public in due course. It's
>not like a UK state secret.
But that's a period of time where other people could be making use of
it.
>- If a company is prevented from keeping its plans confidential then
>it will have a hard time competing with other companies that do keep
>their plans confidential.
Indeed. There's several ways in which various licenses fail to make life
easy for companies that want to enage in closed behaviour.
>- I don't think we should be trying to make a list of all the freedoms
>that we consider to be important and allowing licences to restrict any
>freedom that isn't in our list. A better approach, I think, is to be
>suspicious of any restrictions that are not easily justified as a
>means of furthering software freedom. In general, I don't think it
>helps free software for licences to restrict privacy and
>confidentiality of business plans, hardware designs, etc. However, I
>don't necessarily claim that such restrictions make a licence
>non-free; I am undecided about that.
I entirely agree. It's all a balancing act - I just about err on feeling
that forced passing upstream of distributed modifications helps freedom
more than it hinders it, but it certainly doesn't make me happy.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59-chiark.mail.debian.legal@srcf.ucam.org
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