Glenn Maynard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >On Fri, Jul 16, 2004 at 10:24:12AM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: >> Because, to me, freedom is defined by the ability to do things. It being >> difficult to do that thing does not restrict my freedom, it merely makes >> it harder to assert it. I still have it. > >This seems to be an argument that even the most onerous technical >restrictions in licenses should be accepted, as long as some workaround >can be found--regardless of how much of a pain in the ass that workaround >might be. I don't accept that. A license that goes out of its way to >make freedoms hard to assert (possibly with the goal of preventing them >from actually being asserted) shouldn't be considered free.
My rule of thumb would be that any technical restriction that significantly reduces the set of people who can distribute modified versions is probably non-free. For instance, patch clauses are fine since anyone able to modify the code should be able to produce a patch - a piece of code that required to to reverse engineer a large set of obfuscated code in order to be able to generate a key from your modified code to run it would be non-free. >Making freedom harder to assert is restricting freedom. The GPL makes it harder to assert freedom because you need to spend more time investigating subtle license interactions. Making glib statements is all well and good, but we accept all sorts of things that make freedom harder to assert. -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
