On Sun, Sep 19, 2004 at 12:04:00AM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: > Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org> wrote: > > On Sat, Sep 18, 2004 at 12:12:53AM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: > >> The implication of the post I replied to was that any license that > >> allows the removal of some set of the rights it grants should be > >> non-free. The GPL is an obvious counter-example, since it allows you to > >> lose all rights associated with it. > > > > Termination for non-compliance, in a publically redistributed work, is > > just a reflection of copyright law; it doesn't really change what you > > can and can't do. (You can always get another licensed copy). Every > > free license does this, really. > > RMS has in the past claimed that failure to abide by the terms of the > GPL results in a permanent loss of those rights (in respect to a > specific piece of software, at least). If you're going to disagree with > the copyright holder of what is probably still the largest single body > of GPLed software in Debian at present, I'm going to want evidence of a > decent legal standpoint for this opinion. RMS has in the past claimed that this has happened to various groups. RMS has been ignored. RMS has not pursued the matter, so one presumes the FSF counsel have indicated that he can't. Whenever you receive a copy of a GPLed work from anybody, you receive a license for it as well. If your license has been terminated due to non-compliance, you merely have to receive another copy from anybody to get a new license. For publically distributed software this is trivial. > > The use of a termination clause to introduce other restrictions (other > > than "you must comply with the license"), rather than simply writing > > those restrictions in directly, indicates that they probably aren't > > things you can write in directly, such as restrictions on use > > (copyright abuse aside for the moment; that doesn't help us, it just > > employs more lawyers). Such things are non-free restrictions (the set > > of things you're not allowed to restrict in a copyright license is > > fairly small). > > As far as I can tell, your argument is that "You may not initiate patent > suits against the licensor" is equivilent to "Initiating patent suits > against the licensor will result in the loss of your rights under this > license". I would tend to agree. You then appear to claim that the first > is obviously non-free, and as a result the second is non-free. I see no > obvious reason that the first point of this assertion is true. > If you want to claim that the only restrictions on freedom we currently > accept are those that are entirely controlled under copyright law, you > may be correct (the Apache License 2.0 is an obvious counter-example, > but you could always claim that that's counter to normal policy and > thus some sort of error). The clause you are referring to in the Apache License 2.0 has no effect on software without patents, due in large part to the efforts of -legal. It's probably non-free when applied to software with patents and enforced. This isn't particularly surprising; "software patents are non-free" is more or less a given. [For the rest, read the mail you're replying to; it doesn't appear relevant] > We don't accept restrictions as free because they use one branch of the > law - we accept restrictions as free because they are either unimportant > or because they protect free software more than they hinder it. This indicates that a proprietary license is free if the software is useful enough. Therefore it's wrong. We don't accept restrictions because they protect free software more than they hinder it. We accept restrictions because they do not appreciably hinder it. There is no excuse for significant restrictions, nor has one ever been excused. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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