Edmund Grimley-Evans wrote: > I was thinking of a case where the software is being used in a > secretive industry. For example, suppose I work for a semiconductor > company with 500-100 employees. A lot of what we do is temporarily > confidential, in that we don't want the rest of the world finding out > what we are working on until there is an official announcement. We use > free software. We even use ML in some projects, though I personally > use Haskell. Sometimes we might want to distribute software that uses > a free library to selected partners, with whom carefully drafted > non-disclosure agreements have been signed. I can't imagine the legal > department accepting anything like 6c. Whoa, back up a minute. That's not even close to acceptable, and it's not something the GPL would allow either. If the software you are distributing is copylefted, all those you distribute the software to must have all the same Freedoms to that Free Software, which precludes the possibility of an NDA. A case where the right to privacy applies would be something like contract work on Free Software to produce a modified version for a company or organization. The company or organization has all the necessary freedoms; they just voluntarily choose not to exercise them. Such software would be Free, just privately distributed. That is much different from the case of distributing software under an NDA which would restrict the freedoms of your "selected partners". - Josh Triplett
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