On Tue, 9 Jan 2007 20:14:05 -0500 Roberto C. Sanchez wrote: > On Wed, Jan 10, 2007 at 01:34:53AM +0100, Francesco Poli wrote: > > > > Hence, I don't know what the lawyers are looking for, but a license > > that grants too few permissions is not OK to me, even if it does so > > in a legally perfect manner. > > > It seems to me that you are looking at this as a sort of "all or > nothing" situation. I don't think that is correct. It's not "all or nothing": it's a threshold situation. There's a boundary between (DFSG-)free works and non-free works. A work may be closer to or farther from the boundary, but it's on one side XOR on the other. Hence, some works may be licensed in a more permissive or more restrictive manner, and consequently be more or less acceptable (or otherwise less or more unacceptable) than others. But what counts for their acceptability in Debian (main) is their compliance with the DFSG (as well as other technical constraints, as outlined in the Debian Policy Manual[1]). [1] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-main > > A license that grants what you consider to be too few permissions > might be too many for some. When I said "too few", I didn't refer to personal tastes or to the needs of a specific situation (e.g.: there are cases where GPL-incompatibility is a show stopper...). I was instead referring to an agreed-upon set of guidelines for determining if a work is "free", namely to the DFSG. > Now if we were to rely only standard > copyright, then only the original creator would be permitted to > distribute his work. There is no such thing as "standard copyright". According to copyright laws, the copyright holder has the exclusive right to perform *and authorize others to perform* some operations on his/her own works. One of these operations is distribution. Since, luckily, the copyright holder can authorize other people to perform these operations, he/she can grant enough permissions to make his/her work "free", as long as he/she (hopefully) wants to do so. > Redistribution would be prohibited. Now, if the > creator decides that he would like to permit free redistribution as > long as the redistributor does not realize a commercial gain, then > fine. That is an improvement, because before that the redistributor > would not have been permitted to redistribute. Depending on the > situation, the creator may have decided to create the work and give it > away, as long others did likewise without making money. Of course, it's an improvement, but it's *not* enough to make the work DFSG-free. Likewise, if I have the right to kick you 80 times, and I decide that I will kick you 65 times only, it's an improvement from your point of view, but it's not (or should not be) enough to make you happy... > > Now, is this situation perfect? No. I suppose the utopian ideal > would be something like ST:TNG, where we all endeavor in a field of > our choosing about which we are passionate solely for the purpose of > self actualization. All knowledge is shared and there is no > impediment to its exchange. Of course, as we live in the real world > and are predominantly driven by money as a society, we really can't do > as they do in ST:TNG. Well, in a society that's "predominantly driven by money", free software could not be a viable solution, if it discriminated against commercial activities. Avoiding discriminations against commercial activities is a deliberate feature of free software and one of the keys for its success. Indeed, something vaguely similar to free software, but exclusively non-commercial, would *not* have been as successful as actual free software; that non-commercial-only kind of software really exists and is sometimes referred to as "semi-free software"[2], but, IMHO, fails to get to the achievements that free software is instead reaching. [2] http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/categories.html#semi-freeSoftware -- http://frx.netsons.org/progs/scripts/releas-o-meter.html Try our amazing Releas-o-meter! ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == C979 F34B 27CE 5CD8 DC12 31B5 78F4 279B DD6D FCF4
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