On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 06:07:19PM +1300, Nick Phillips wrote: > Damn. Still being misuderstood. The intention of that paragraph was not > to allow arbitrary restrictions, but rather to indicate that perhaps we > do believe that *some* (as yet unspecified, but soon to be specified) > restrictions are acceptable. > I was originally going to add another paragraph on the end, of the form: > The types of restriction that we believe are acceptable are as > follows: > * <blah> > * <blah> > * <blah> > With blah, blah and blah to be discussed if and when it appeared that > we agreed on the fact that *some* restrictions would be acceptable. > But then I thought that that paragraph was ugly and unnecessary, so I > removed it... *shrug* > So the question I was trying to ask was "do we believe that there are > *any* restrictions which would be acceptable?" -- with the intention that > if/when the answer turned out to be "yes", then we could discuss precisely > which restrictions they would be. My answer, so far, is "I have yet to see such a restriction that I think should be acceptable." I don't think the pet-the-cat comment was misdirected; it neatly encapsulates the scorn for licenses that would claim to be free while imposing arbitrary restrictions on use, modification, or distribution that further the copyright holder's, er, "pet" agenda. So far, I don't see anything to qualitatively differentiate petting a cat if you distribute the software, to giving up your rights to unrelated patents if you distribute the software. Perhaps if you started with a particular restriction that *you* thought would be acceptable, we would stand a better chance of figuring out if there is actually a consensus in the project that that restriction is acceptable, and expand out from there. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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