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Re: An old question of EGE's



On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 03:37:32PM -0400, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
> The idea from DFSG 3 that modifications must be able to be
> "distributed under the same terms as the license of the
> original software" seems to be an important component of Freedom.  I
> really do think, on consideration, that this means the actual license
> I had, not a big document listing all of the licenses I might get if I
> paid the author or became a teacher or ceased to operate nuclear power
> plants.

What about a viral (can't remove permissions) license that, among other,
free terms (eg. "include source with all copies"), said:

7: Teachers may distribute the work to students without including source.

This is part of the same license, a special exception to make educational
use more convenient.  I don't think we'd consider it non-free, since it's
just an additional permission for specific conditions.

This seems functionally identical to what you're objecting to: you're
required to give a special set of people additional permissions for your
modifications--permissions which even you don't have in the original code
(since you're not a teacher).

In this form, it seems to pass this interpretation of DFSG#3, since the
additional permission is a term of the same license you have; it's just
not a clause that you can make use of.  A real example of this is the
"operating system" exception in the GPL, which Debian can't make use of,
but must regardless extend to others.

The only difference I can see is that a teacher only receives this
permission when he receives a copy of the work; if somebody doesn't
receive a copy, they don't get a license, so you can't be compelled
to extend a license to anybody.  I don't know if this is an important
point or not (what good is a license to my work if you don't have a
copy?)

-- 
Glenn Maynard



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