Re: Suggestions of David Nusinow, was: RPSL and DFSG-compliance - choice of venue
On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 11:34:43PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> >"Extreme views" here is a meaningless term and an tasteless attempt at
> >demagoguery. I've tolerated it this far, but enough is enough; please
> >grow some manners. The validity of a viewpoint is not determined by
> >how close it comes to some end of an arbitrary scale.
>
> Manners? From you? Ha!
Well, you sure told him!
> So, at what point does it end? I've seen people seriously (I assume)
> suggesting here in the last few weeks that they variously don't
> consider the GPL, the BSD or MIT licenses free. If we're going to be
> that paranoid, why bother playing this game any more? If you take that
> attitude, we've lost already.
Who is saying each of these?
I've said that I dislike some effects of the GPL, but not that it's
non-free. Walter Landry has said that he believes the GPL would fail
the DFSG if DFSG#10 wasn't there, but it is, and he hasn't suggested
(as far as I know) that he actually considers the GPL non-free. These
are the only things I can remember that you might be referring to.
I can't remember anyone ever saying that the MIT license is non-free,
except for a brief discussion about the MIT's "associated documentation"
wording, which we quickly agreed about and moved on. (That's a useful
case, in fact: a very short, very clearly free license, but with an
interpretation that would be non-free--that "associated documentation"
includes documentation that isn't distributed with or derived from the
software. It, like the Pine case, shows how free licenses can have
non-free instantiations.)
Personally, I think the 4-clause BSD's advertising clause feels non-free
(eg. the banner ad case), but it's not a strong feeling nor one I'm pushing.
I can't think of any sense in which the 2- or 3-clause BSD licenses could
be called non-free, or any case where somebody has seriously suggested it.
I can't remember anyone ever suggesting that any of these licenses should
start being ripped from Debian; if somebody seriously believed that they
were non-free, that's what I'd expect. Discussions about established
licenses, and understanding and acknowledgement of problems they may have,
are very useful.
--
Glenn Maynard
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