On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 11:20:15AM -0800, Brian Behlendorf wrote: > On Thu, 25 Jan 2001, Joseph Carter wrote: > > 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor > > > > The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program > > in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the > > program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic > > research. > > > > If a license says you cannot use this software for x, that is almost > > always a violation of the DFSG. Software that must never be modified to > > deviate from a standard quite clearly fails the above. > > Uh, no. At least, not from the above - you're extrapolating "field of > endevor" to "can not use software for x", where I presume "x" is your term > for "non-standards-compliant use". The examples used above are very > different from a clause talking about a protocol standard, and not just a > technical difference. For example, a license stating "this software can't > be redistributed by a genetics company" would leave me, if I were a > programmer for Genentech, completely out of luck, by virtue of who I am. > However, if it said "I can't distribute a modification that violates a > standard", that doesn't lock me out, that just says I have a hoop I have > to jump through. So, ethically it's a much different case. > > The "rationale" given (written originally by Perens, I presume) is: "the > major intention of this clause is to prohibit license traps that prevent > open source from being used commercially. We want commercial users to join > our community, not feel excluded from it."
Well, I don't know how people are going to like this, but here goes anyway. I think we should introduce the concept of precedent into our deliberations here on debian-legal. That is, when a clause of the DFSG has been consistenly interpreted to mean that some aspect of a license is or is not free, then that should be taken to be a real factor in our deliberations. Its application here would be thus: Debian-legal has repeatedly held that requiring or prohibiting particular behavior as a condition of distributiing modified versions is in violation of the Fields of Endeavor clause of the DFSG. Thus, the OpenDivx license is in violation of the DFSG. References: http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal-0012/msg00109.html Among others. (for some reason the search engine for -legal isn't working so well). How does that sound? sam th [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.abisource.com/~sam/ GnuPG Key: http://www.abisource.com/~sam/key
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