On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 03:25:19PM -0400, Glenn Maynard wrote: > On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 09:23:40AM -0400, David Nusinow wrote: > > I agree with this interpretation to a large degree. The examples in the DFSG > > for fields of endeavor are explicit examples, and thus imply some sort of > > explicit discrimination (such as "No one involved in genetic engineering may > > use this software") rather than an unintentional discrimination against > > corner > > cases. Licenses which require distribution of modifications to upstream > > authors are not discriminating against castaways any more than the GPL is > > discriminating against people who somehow lose all copies of the source to > > their modifications after distributing modified binaries. > > This is why DFSG#5 and #6 are fairly useless, in practice. I can't think of > any license that actually explicitly said "may not be used for bioweapons > research", clauses that clearly fall under those guidelines. Any less
"No commercial use" is the usual one. I'm pretty sure I've seen a licence that prohibited use in genetics research, and I'm quite sure there's been one that prohibited use in nuclear facilities (although that was more of an overzealous warranty disclaimer, from memory). > direct arguments tend to reduce to absurdity almost immediately, eg. "the > GPL discriminates against the field of creating proprietary software"--it > certainly does, and almost all licenses "discriminate" against people who > don't want to comply with those terms, but we don't read DFSG#6 that way. Indeed. It's scope is fairly narrow once you look at it in a non-absurd fashion, but it still has it's uses. - Matt
