Re: NEW ocaml licence proposal by upstream, will be part of the 3.08.1 release going into sarge.
Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org> wrote:
> 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.
It don't think it affects my analysis whether a fee is an example of a
restriction, or just an additional thing that licenses can't do,
> 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.
If I understand correctly, you argue that DFSG #1-#9 should be
interpreted in such a way to make the GPL free (because of, among
other things, flamewars on -legal). That makes DFSG #10 a no-op. I
argue that DFSG #10 enforces a particular interpretation. DFSG #10 is
thus a consistency check. For those with the proper mindset, DFSG #10
is thus a no-op. I'm not sure that we're disagreeing about anything
important.
Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu
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