RE: RFS: spim

[Jim Larus <larus@microsoft.com>]

I give permission to anyone to  modify and distribute spim and xspim, so long as my name and copyright  remains on the code.

James Larus 
larus@microsoft.com
Cloud Computing Futures • Microsoft Research                               
http://research.microsoft.com/~larus      ; 
425-706-2981

-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Finney [mailto:ben+debian@benfinney.id.au] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 7:41 PM
To: Jim Larus
Cc: debian-legal@lists.debian.org; Mackenzie Morgan
Subject: Re: RFS: spim

Jim Larus <larus@microsoft.com> writes:

> Just to confirm: I give permission to any open source project to 
> modify and distribute spim and xspim, so long as my name and copyright 
> remains on the code.

Thanks for persisting with this.

However, this is insufficient for the work to meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines. For those guidelines, the license terms must grant
*any* recipient of the work via Debian, regardless of that recipient's purpose or field of endeavour, to modify and redistribute the work under the same license terms.

You might like to quickly review the guidelines we use to judge the freedom of a work <URL:http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt>, and a related FAQ document <URL:http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html>.

Would it be acceptable to grant license under the terms of the Expat license <URL:http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt>? If you make a statement that you grant recipients of the works ‘spim’ and ‘xspim’ a license under those terms, then those works will be unambiguously free under the DFSG.

-- 
 \     “We are no more free to believe whatever we want about God than |
  `\         we are free to adopt unjustified beliefs about science or |
_o__)              history […].” —Sam Harris, _The End of Faith_, 2004 |
Ben Finney <ben@benfinney.id.au>