Re: non-free and users?
Anthony Towns wrote:
On Fri, Jan 23, 2004 at 02:39:36AM +0100, Sergey V. Spiridonov wrote:
I think we agreed that rejecting to help 'B', when we are busy with
helping 'A' is O.K. It will be completely ethical to act in this way.
It produces no evil to answer "Sorry, we are busy with helping S.
Spiridonov and other Debian users to fix printing of Russian in Mozilla"
when I. Ivanov will request to package Nvidia driver.
There is no corresponding "we're too busy" formulation for the question
"Would you mind distributing this program on your mirrors, and letting me
use your BTS for it?
So, do you agree with my example? You think it is O.K. to reject request
to package and distribute non-free Nvidia driver?
> It's very useful for Chinese dissidents, but comes
with a license that says it's not allowed to be used by Iraqi dictators
to organise their mass graves, so unfortunately it's non-free, and the
author has been abducted by separatist guerillas, so can't be contacted
to relicense the software."
Well, if you want to talk about such kind of a license, we can. But, can
you please agree or disagree first about license which does not allows
to distribute modified sources?
Answering "no, we won't help you" in that case seems like it would
"produce evil" by your formulation; and for that reason we should continue
to distribute non-free software.
I ask you to answer, the following questions. I think, it is
important for our discussion, for me, for you, for Debian and the whole
world.
1. What are good consequences of distributing program under free license
like GPL?
2. What are bad consequences of distributing program under free license
like GPL?
3. What are good consequences of distributing program under non-free
license, which prohibits to distribute modified sources?
4. What are bad consequences of distributing program under non-free
license, which prohibits to distribute modified sources?
Please, do not ignore any of them and try to produce complete answers,
if possible. Thanks.
--
Best regards, Sergey Spiridonov
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