Am 2016-08-25 um 06:52 schrieb Tobias Frost:
Am Mittwoch, den 24.08.2016, 22:06 +0200 schrieb Elmar Stellnberger:The license in use, C-FSL v1.0 will still need to be reviewed. A predecessor license C-FSL v0.8 had already been discussed on debian-legal some time ago. However v1.0 has been reworked basing on the input I had received from there and should now hopefully be without issues.I think one recommendation has not been followed. If not, I *strongly* recommend: PLEASE Do not run your own license. See https://people.debian.org/~bap/ dfsg-faq.html §5 I took me some time to locate this license (please put it somewhere and link to it).
The license is online under https://www.elstel.org/license. The URL may be a bit hard to find and if you like I can link it from https://www.elstel.org/software/. You are right; the URL should probably be referred to in the license itself. If you have any further improvements towards locating the license then please let me know.
I located it then in the header of the xchroot script, and as I only had 5 minutes to take a look, I come only to this sentence: "If a specific version number is mentioned then usage rights include this version as well as any newer version which will always be similar in spirit to this license. The term Convertible Free Software license may be abbreviated as C-FSL." - This will fail the the tentacle of evil test. - What happens if there is no version number attached? Choose any? Choose latest?
It should not fail the tentacle of evil test as the user of the program may choose which version of the license to execute: the version mentioned with the programme or any newer version. It quasi gives any new author the right to re-license within C-FSL. As the original author never looses his/her copyright he can always re-license (whatever the previous license may look like: BSD/GPL/...); i.e. you can never (fully) shield against the case of an evil author re-licensing proprietarily under any given license of the universe - with BSD that is not even intended. The right to switch to a newer version is up to anyone who receives a program under C-FSL and it does not forbid to keep an elder version of the license if you prefer that. This is due to the principal of legal certainity taking precedence over correctness of law and it is a basic principle in any legal system I know. The clause has just been invented to alleviate me from the pain of having to re-publish existing programs with a newer version of the license (in which case both versions can be applied forever).
no version number attached: you have a good point in it as we had already discussed v0.8 of the license which was never meant to be executed in practice; I should have included the version to default to 1.0 at least; not sure what it would take to make this good.
"3. It is your obligation that the changed version of your sources will be available to the public for free within the time frame of a month at least if there is no undue hindrance by the authors to make it available. " As distribution is not limited to the people using the stuff, this is non-free. Fails Desert Island Test and Dissident Tests.
You have a good point in this! Thanks for your input. I should mention: "You may always distribute a product under C-FSL in unchanged form. ..."; otherwise if you change or execute the term 'use' would clearly apply to my believe.
(I have stopped here... Above is not a complete analysis of any section, also not up to 3.I) PLEASE do not run your own license.
Yes, I know that usage of an own license is discouraged due to the many issues that may arise. However I do certainly have a point in creating this license as I wanna keep the right to re-license which is not included by GPL. BSD on the other hand has no provisions against making software licensed under BSD non-free be it by the application of patents, DRM or other stuff. I do also know that the KDE team had a problem with their license when Apple came to publish their respective amendments in the sources of Safari. They do not run and will never run on OSS and this makes Apple publishing their sources rather useless to the OSS community. Another issue is that I do not want to 'register' i.e. sell my personal data to a company I do not trust just in order to fetch their GPL-ed sources.
-- tobi
If anyone here would be ready to further investigate C-FSL I will highly appreciate your effort in doing so. Why not have a discussion at debian-legal? I`d personally like to get the issues with it resolved as soon as possible. Otherwise if you believe that I do not have sufficient stance to do so by the software I have currently released then I would need to wait ...
Elmar