Barak Pearlmutter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > With a little help, I've composed a draft DFSG FAQ. It meant as an > introduction to issues discussed on debian-legal, with some general > background material to help bring naive readers up from ground zero. > > http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html
Here are a few suggestions: You may want to mention the pine license fiasco wrt question #3, as it's an excellent example of a license that would ordinarily have been considered free, but the copyright holder had an odd interpretation of the license which we decided to honor, thus making it non-free. 7. (d), answer: No, not unless the clickwrap stuff can be removed. In principle one could put the GPL in a clickwrap and the license would be perfectly fine. But once you add a requirement that the software must be distributed via the clickwrap, or that clickwrap code can not be removed from the software your license becomes non-free. Since clickwraps without such a requirement are a bit pointless, clickwrap licenses are virtually always non-free. In 7 (g) & (h) you mention adding suggestions that are not part of the license. Whether these suggestions are part of the license text (even if optional) is left ambiguous. The advantage to being part of the license text, of course, is that it becomes a sort of "invariant text" that must follow the work. I'm not saying we should necessarily change that, mind, we may *want* that to be ambiguous so as to avoid folks adding lots of extraneous text to licenses. In the answer to question 9 it might be worth noting the question of whether or not things can actually be released into the public domain. My understanding is that debian-legal generally quietly re-interprets such claims as an extremely permissive license. 11 A: In order for two licenses to be compatible it must be possible to mingle code under both licenses in a new work. When this is done the result is that the terms of both licenses must be met for the work as a whole. The GNU GPL makes this feature of copyright law explicit by stating that if you cannot for any reason (e.g., because of another license) meet the terms of the GPL, the GPL grants no rights at all. In order for a license to be GPL compatible, then, you must be able to meet both the terms of the GPL and the other license simultaneously. 12 A: (should probably be combined with 13) When a work is released under a dual license the recipient is explicitly given the option to choose which license to apply to a derivative work. Someone making modifications may include new code under the GPL (thus making the result strictly GPL) or the alternative license (thus selecting the alternate license). The GPL is particularly common in dual licenses because it allows the code to link with the large number of GPL code out there, or to be pulled into GPL works. (I'm not sure where you want to go with the bit about "dual GNU GPL/Artistic" or "dual GNU GPL/QPL".) -- Jeremy Hankins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
