On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 11:34:43PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote: > >"Extreme views" here is a meaningless term and an tasteless attempt at > >demagoguery. I've tolerated it this far, but enough is enough; please > >grow some manners. The validity of a viewpoint is not determined by > >how close it comes to some end of an arbitrary scale. > > Manners? From you? Ha!
Well, you sure told him! > So, at what point does it end? I've seen people seriously (I assume) > suggesting here in the last few weeks that they variously don't > consider the GPL, the BSD or MIT licenses free. If we're going to be > that paranoid, why bother playing this game any more? If you take that > attitude, we've lost already. Who is saying each of these? I've said that I dislike some effects of the GPL, but not that it's non-free. Walter Landry has said that he believes the GPL would fail the DFSG if DFSG#10 wasn't there, but it is, and he hasn't suggested (as far as I know) that he actually considers the GPL non-free. These are the only things I can remember that you might be referring to. I can't remember anyone ever saying that the MIT license is non-free, except for a brief discussion about the MIT's "associated documentation" wording, which we quickly agreed about and moved on. (That's a useful case, in fact: a very short, very clearly free license, but with an interpretation that would be non-free--that "associated documentation" includes documentation that isn't distributed with or derived from the software. It, like the Pine case, shows how free licenses can have non-free instantiations.) Personally, I think the 4-clause BSD's advertising clause feels non-free (eg. the banner ad case), but it's not a strong feeling nor one I'm pushing. I can't think of any sense in which the 2- or 3-clause BSD licenses could be called non-free, or any case where somebody has seriously suggested it. I can't remember anyone ever suggesting that any of these licenses should start being ripped from Debian; if somebody seriously believed that they were non-free, that's what I'd expect. Discussions about established licenses, and understanding and acknowledgement of problems they may have, are very useful. -- Glenn Maynard
