Re: NEW ocaml licence proposal by upstream, will be part of the 3.08.1 release going into sarge.

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org>]

On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 09:51:51PM -0400, Walter Landry wrote:
> I would say that the DFSG uses imprecise language.  DFSG #10 enforces
> a particular interpretation of the language.  That is, DFSG #1 does
> not really mean _no_ fee, just not certain types of fees.

I think the DFSG#1's "may not restrict ..." is a superset of "fees"; it's
what I'd point to, if asked to explain why the DFSG says "you may only
redistribute on Monday" is non-free; I don't think there's any sane
interpretation of "fee" that includes that requirement, but it's clearly
a restriction.  I believe DFSG#1 really does mean "no restrictions are
allowed", where "fee" is an example.

So, more generally (in your terms), I think DFSG#1 does not really mean
_no_ restrictions are allowed, just not certain types of restrictions.
I think this is very much the interpretation that has been used in
practice, and I believe it's the only sane one: we clearly believe many
restrictions on distribution are non-free (not all of which are "fees"
at all), but we also clearly do allow certain restrictions.

I think this does permit the GPL, provided that the project believes that
the GPL's restrictions are reasonable.  The DFSG does not give much in
the way of guidelines to determine what restrictions are reasonable and
which are not, but that's precisely why we have long and detailed debates
about choice of law, forced distribution, invariant sections, and so on.
I think this is the correct behavior--these decisions which took hundreds
of posts to come to any consensus on couldn't have been correctly decided
by a couple magic guidelines.  I believe all of this is a feature of the
DFSG, not a bug.  (Doing freedom right takes work.)

Alternative interpretations of DFSG#1 seem to be: 1, that no restrictions
are allowed--clearly useless, rejecting most licenses; 2, that *only* fees
(for some definition of "fee") is disallowed; which I believe neither
follows from the text nor is a good guideline for freedom, being far too
narrow (for example, ignoring the "only on Monday" example).  At least
for DFSG#1 wrt. the GPL, there's no need to be interpreting DFSG#10 as a
grandfather clause.

-- 
Glenn Maynard