Don Armstrong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >On Fri, 16 Jul 2004, Matthew Garrett wrote: >> In the case of forced distribution of code back upstream, it results >> in a wider range of people being able to take advantages of your >> modifications. > >So would a license that required you to redistribute any custom >modifications to any other unrelated software that you had made >available as a condition of distributing modified versions of it. > >Hopefully you agree the above is clearly non free.
Yes, but only because I don't believe licenses should affect the distribution of anything other than the code they cover. At the point where we start using licenses to do anything other than extend copyright law (by, say, restricting your rights under other licenses) we've lost a great deal of the moral argument. >In the specific case that you mention, we've used DFSG 5 as a >mechanism for rejecting licenses that require distribution of >modifications to people outside of the distribution path of binaries >made from those modifications. You have, and those arguments are weak. There's also disagreement here - some people claim forced distribution breaches DFSG 1, some claim it breaches DFSG 5. There's no consistent and coherent argument going on, other than a sort of fuzzy "We think it's not free, and we can sort of point at these two things and handwave and say they cover them". And, frankly, that's not convincing. The GPL discriminates against a slightly smaller set of dissidents. The GPL discriminates against people on desert islands who have a binary CD but not a source one. Make the tests sufficiently silly and we can ban every single license for discriminating against a field of endeavour. -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
