Josh Triplett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Walter Landry wrote: > > I haven't seen anyone seriously dispute my analysis in > > > > http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg01705.html > > > > that there is a fee involved (you questioned whether it was an > > acceptable fee, not whether it was a fee at all). Matthew Palmer > > mentioned it again here > > > > http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg01739.html > > > > and there was no response. I also mentioned it here > > > > http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/08/msg00131.html > > > > Unless someone comes up with something now, the argument looks pretty > > clear. > > I strongly disagree that such clauses are non-free. > > Consider for a moment a license that said something like "You must > either distribute under this license with source, or under a proprietary > license without source.", (where the license is otherwise > BSD/MIT/X11-like, and with a definition for "proprietary" given > somewhere in the license). > > This would be a form of "copyleft", that requires derived works to > maintain the "right" for _everyone_ to make proprietary derived > works. I think such a license would still be Free, albeit annoying. > For someone who only cares about Free Software, the additional > permission is useless, and only serves to allow others to take the > work proprietary.
I would say that any license that compels modifications to be under anything other than a copyleft is problematic. Copyleft is only allowed because it is explicitly grandfathered in by DFSG #10. So the GPL, MIT/BSD/X11, IBM CPL, and Artistic licenses don't have this problem. This hypothetical license does. I don't think any licenses in Debian have this problem, although I could be wrong. Cheers, Walter Landry [EMAIL PROTECTED]
