On Sun, 24 Aug 2008 14:17:26 -0400 Arc Riley wrote: > Given that we're talking about an official FSF license, Being an official FSF license does not, by itself, prove anything (other than being officially approved by the FSF, that is), hence I think mentioning it is superfluous (and even smells of appeal to authority). > written and > supported by SFLC lawyers, explicitally GPLv3 compatible, I would say "artificially" GPLv3 compatible, through ad-hoc compatibility clauses... > drafted and > approved through a lengthy public process that included input from the > Debian project, I personally sent comments to both public drafts of the AfferoGPLv3. See, for instance: http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/rt/readsay.html?Query=%20Creator%20=%20%27frx%27%20%20AND%20%27CF.NoteUrl%27%20LIKE%20%27agplv3-draft-2%27%20&Rows=50 They seem to have been utterly ignored. I haven't even received any response at all. The FSF can set up all the public consultation processes they like, but that does not, by itself, prove that the end result is approved of by the community of interested parties. It just proves that the FSF had the *opportunity* to listen to comments from the community: it was up to them to choose which comments they would take into account and which they would redirect to /dev/null... > and adopted by many free software projects, By many software projects which, thus, chose to become non-free software projects... Of course this is my own opinion, and yours differs. But I added the above "correction" to show that your argument is circular and thus proves nothing: "this license is adopted by many free software projects, so it must be free", well, but who said that those software projects are *free* software projects? > I think the > AGPLv3 warrants a bit more involved debate than continually repeating > personal opinions. Sorry, but I cannot see any other way to analyze the DFSG-compliance of (works solely released under the terms of) a license: each involved person reads the license and compares it with the DFSG; then, he/she expresses his/her own *opinions* about whether the license succeeds or fails to meet the DFSG. Moreover, please keep in mind that the DFSG are *guidelines*, not rules to be mechanically applied: human judgment is unavoidable... I hope this clarifies things a bit. -- http://frx.netsons.org/doc/index.html#nanodocs The nano-document series is here! ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == C979 F34B 27CE 5CD8 DC12 31B5 78F4 279B DD6D FCF4
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