Lex Spoon wrote: >> * A consideration: if the license document specifies consideration to >> the licensor, the license can't be free. > > Certainly it's a problem if the consideration is sending $1000 to the > author. However, DFSG1 says merely that you cannot charge a royalty or > fee; it does not say that you must require nothing at all, if I am > reading it correctly. Consider two cases where a required consideration > might still leave the license agreement being free. > > > First, the consideration may be something completely acceptible for a > free software license, e.g. "you will include source code with any > distribution of the program." This may be less trivial than it sounds: > the agreement may grant you full rights but then say you are obligated > not to use them all.
This should be considered as a restriction on the grant of rights to distribute the program. If you had rights to distribute the program binary-only for other reasons separate from the license (say, a different license), and this license took those rights away, this would *not* be a free requirement. For instance, consider a GPL-licensed work where the copyright holder offers licenses to use the program without source for a fee. I should certainly be able to use the proprietary license from the copyright holder for one project and the GPL for another. If the GPL contained such a requirement and it wasn't a restriction on the grant of rights, but rather an *actual* consideration, this would be impossible. Get the picture? -- There are none so blind as those who will not see.
