On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 04:14:44PM -0400, Walter Landry wrote: > > I disagree. This is not relevant to the freedom of the license, because > > it's an additional restriction imposed by a *third party* (in this case, > > a government), and not something that can be fixed by additional > > permission grants from the licensor. > > Free software licensing presupposes that the copyright holder has the > > ability to grant you certain freedoms over the code. When this is not > > the case due to outside forces (e.g., patent holders or averse > > governments), we should not view this as a flaw in the license if this > > license gives us the *author's* permission to exercise those freedoms > > with the code. > If I can't modify and distribute the software, how can you call the > software free? If you live in a regime such as this, *you* are not free. This is not the software's fault. > This is not like patents or other usual suspects (e.g. govt > regulations on crypto), which depend on the contents of the software. > Rather it flows directly from the license and its interaction with the > law. The author can make the software free by using a BSD license. But in such a case, you can only be free from compelled sharing with the government by exercising your freedom to withhold source code from your neighbors. You can't build a community that way, so I don't think this is a useful definition of freedom. Freedom to distribute binaries is useful, but is secondary to the freedom to share source code. > As another example, what if there were a jurisdiction where recipients > automatically receive the right to modify and distribute unless > otherwise explicitly specified. Then a simple "Copyright (C) 2000 > Steve Langasek" would be free. The difference between this and the prior example is that in the first case, the *government* has additional rights over the software, whereas in the second case, it is the *author* who has lesser rights over (control of) the software. Yes, in this hypothetical jurisdiction, a mere copyright statement would be free; but we are concerned about freedom at the international level, so we need to take a "least common denominator" look at the rights of copyright holders. If we ever get to the point where this hypothetical jurisdiction *is* the least common denominator, then we can give ourselves all a pat on the back and disband the debian-legal mailing list (or at least not be worried over licenses anymore). -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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