On 01/09/07 16:34, Francesco Poli wrote: > Drafting and actively promoting licenses that forbid commercial use > and/or modifications harms the free software movement, rather than > helping it.
That hasn't always worked out to be the case in my experience. Books and documentation are a common one where that isn't always the case. Small independent publishers and authors have used those clauses to protect themselves from the really giant publishing houses. > Here (on debian-legal) we are interested in licenses that grant the > important freedoms in a legally sound way. The important freedoms are > the ones that follow from the spirit of the DFSG. Off hand, I wonder if it would be helpful to have a debian-dfsg list. It might make it easier to separate the arguments more clearly and also lower the noise for the bona fide lawyers around here who are willing to donate their time to give us free legal guidance. :) > Hence, I don't know what the lawyers are looking for, but a license that > grants too few permissions is not OK to me, even if it does so in a > legally perfect manner. OK. We agree on the legal part. I was curious about potential legal problems. > As I already said, forbidding commercial use is definitely *against* the > spirit of free software and the intent of the DFSG. > Hence, I cannot imagine a reason why doing so could be "important to > free software". Maybe I don't trust capitalism as much as you :) But seriously, I've run across things in the past where non-commercial restrictions made sense for some people but that's maybe more a topic for off list. Happy hacking, Jeff -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
