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Re: Question about license compatibility



In message <[🔎] 200507221058.42817.skellogg@u.washington.edu>, Sean Kellogg <skellogg@u.washington.edu> writes
On Friday 22 July 2005 03:28 am, Matthew Garrett wrote:
Sean Kellogg <skellogg@u.washington.edu> wrote:
> License 1 contains a limitation on use ("educational, research and
> non-profit purposes, without fee") which is a violation of DFSG #6.
> License 2 is less obvious, but I personally believe that a provision that
> forbids charging a fee for distribution is non-free, or at least bad
> policy.  Certainly having a package that prohibits charging for
> distribution would prevent it from being on a Debian CD sold by one of
> the vendors.  Based on the DFSG I'd have to point to #1 and #6...  but
> both are kind of stretches.

That aspect of license 2 isn't a problem - the DFSG don't require that
people be able to charge for an item of software, merely the aggregate
work.

Why is that the case?  The license says:

"The licensee agrees not to charge for the University of California code
itself. The licensee may, however, charge for additions, extensions, or
support."

Actually, doesn't the GPL itself contain exactly the same restriction, just worded a bit differently?

The GPL forbids charging for the code itself. It DOES permit charging (as much as you can get away with) for the effort of packaging it. I'd class packaging as "support", therefore it could be included on a Debian CD because you're not charging for the code.

Cheers,
Wol
--
Anthony W. Youngman - wol at thewolery dot demon dot co dot uk
HEX wondered how much he should tell the Wizards. He felt it would not be a
good idea to burden them with too much input. Hex always thought of his reports
as Lies-to-People.
The Science of Discworld : (c) Terry Pratchett 1999



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