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| It is entirely within your rights as copyright holder to push whatever | social agenda you wish with your software license -- but debian-legal's | position is that that will make the license non-free. If you wish to | require that it not be used in nuclear facilities, fine: non-free. If | you require that people who use the software spend a moment to think | about the plight of the homeless, fine: non-free. Just as, when you | require attribution in a particular format and with a particular text, | that's fine, but non-free. This seems entirely too black-and-white to me. If a license for commercial software requires me to purchase a copy of it and only run one copy at a time, on one machine at a time, that's acceptable to me. I would prefer that the license allow me to pirate at will, of course, or that the source all be there and the license allows me to fork it. Similarly, I am not willing to accept a license which requires me to allow the company publishing the software to automatically update it at any time, and to pretty much do whatever they want to my machine with no liability. I am also not willing to accept a license which requires me to license all works produced by the software to them. Basically, by having "free" and "non-free", you lump everything together into "free" as in absolutely, strictly, lilly-white, no-strings-attached freedom, while "non-free" covers everything from reiser (free, as above, with the restriction that there must be attribution) to microsoft (you pay a huge license fee and basically sign away your soul). Even if you don't think Microsoft is as evil as that, I still think it would be a personal insult to Hans and everyone involved if anyone called them a huge, faceless corporation. I use Gentoo, personally, but one of my favorite things about debian is that I can choose a level of stability -- from "stable but 5-10 years old" to "this WILL break your computer", _including_ things in between such as "don't trust your life savings to it, but we've never seen it break" and "this is slightly bleeding-edge, but people have gotten it to work". I think there should be a similar option with licenses -- from "free" to "microsoft", including things in between such as djb or reiser style licenses. Right now, there's only "free" and "non-free". If I am human and sane, my _only_ choice is probably "non-free" anyway. If this has already been discussed, please point me to some archive to read about it. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iQIVAwUBQJKHungHNmZLgCUhAQLfhA//YX2mUTwS3symDhW4JMMX2CCz91LpbqeC uhSGQiFBPDLhHTZCImYbcTTY0jQYNfTsn102OwnkYA9J4nyPdSlQnJqE+p26GWA6 rcsriA+e7t07NpOZ6/Qu5+ocFAYau47nHOyTWEkTuItGISaYVWLzuyzATz2ArsND rbM59Tc1HMSX05S5EIjev/a5nQrNZjXanvMqGaZO+TdC/GcdTxlSnjZYWUPNKro9 Nur3rd38zSwKNeCjevISJrMwADcY4XD6G6+X60kXrcAlL60p8LLujJ1GZtor2oYl P8oGK12+tBSK4MMeXZss3ds8L4NCBPM7AO40zAx+C80wBCluONPchICadHrwUeP7 ynNAXFAgX01B5565ziESk3V6vjO/9ASKptsOYpFyqZHQvvzZ3lhoxcu4Tz0UtJm2 IhLQt09IdpMLbhD1fJ4hK+r9rNvKhdlcvwTCo0spZNr6F4THZ83z9XTMpzgm41L0 EdiTC0dJEQAMMJHeSlJwaaLbO8ATlNmG7FMDkiFRrgP9JWxxr3sN9nGHa5nWU9oP jEaHK/gOdJnyBvPlAz1OBD3apLYbxJRGp4ZdN3vU4t7ZET+s3fyT7Mrvv25uCC8O bC2gkmOBznu8CHMjwsOsk3q9zZXiddmzIAqEDykrdfdHad13dUoqsHG8Ip5+XiWf FF5fF8kNWpI= =pyTf -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
