On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 06:28:28PM -0400, Raul Miller wrote: > On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 05:00:54PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > >Your modifications, corrections, or extensions have value. > ... > > This clause violates the intent of DFSG 1, in my opinion. "The license > > may not require a royalty or other fee for such sale." It does not seem > > reasonable to me to assume that the license *may* require royalty or > > other fees for other activities, apart from sale, normally protected by > > copyright but which are part and parcel of software freedom. > > You should provide a more significant objection than "your modifications > have value". I don't think it's an "insigificant" objection. Let's consider the converse. No modification can ever achieve independent copyrightability. But that is clearly not true -- it is commonplace for people add their copyright notices legitimately to files they modify. Why does the FSF ask for assignment of copyright of substantial modifications to their works (like Apple's Objective-C frontend to gcc) if such things cannot be copyrightable? Since "your modifications cannot have value" is clearly absurd, it must be the case that "your modifications can have value". > "Distribution of source", as required by the GPL, has value, so your > logic would this mean that the GPL is non-free. No, because modification is not distribution, and I cannot copyright my act of distribution[1]. [1] I won't bring up the phenomenon of "performance art" if you won't... -- G. Branden Robinson | I'm a firm believer in not drawing Debian GNU/Linux | trend lines before you have data branden@debian.org | points. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Tim Ottinger
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