Re: Anton's amendment

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Anton Zinoviev <anton@lml.bas.bg> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 12:24:44PM +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
>>
>> And the reasoning why "Currently there is no such problem" is based
>> on the assumption that there are only a few invariant sections
>> (except for history, of course), in other words because mostly only
>> the FSF uses this option.
>
> Yes - I am explaining why _currently_ this is not a problem. :-) 

This isn't funny.  If it's currently not a problem, but can be, the
license is non-free.

>> > It is no less free than the licenses that directly prohibit compilation 
>> > works.
>> 
>> Personally, I would regard a license that prohibits compilation of a
>> work under that license with other works under the same license, but
>> from a different copyright holder, to be non-free.  I am not aware of
>> any works in Debian under such a license.
>
> OK, I am going repeat this at least for third time :-)
>
>    Debian acknowledges as free some licenses that require that the
>    source of all derived works is distributed in the form
>    original_source+patch.  If you have two works covered by such
>    license then there is no permissible way to distribute the source
>    of the combined work (unless the combined work is merely
>    aggregation of independent derivatives of both works).

I'm talking about "compilation" in the sense of "combine two or more
works into one", not in the sense of "running a compiler" or any other
sense it possibly has.  And I don't see how a patch clause forbids
this.  In the simplest case, the second work is arranged to be a patch
of the first.  If I want to combine two such works, and apply changes,
it's getting technically burdensome, but only until someone has written
cdps (common Debian patch{clause} system).  This is different with
invariant sections and the problems they cause when creating combined
works or stripped-down works, since they cannot be solved technically.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)