On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 02:04:29PM +0300, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote: > Is there an "official" term for software that comes with source code > but does not allow one to modify or distribute it (modified or not)? > [This was the original question that fueled my curiosity.]
By giving up any of those freedoms, it means you give up on using free software. See (a random comment from today) http://lwn.net/Articles/391578/ . But you asked a technical question, and thus I'll focus on it. > > Are there licenses that provide the code but do not allow (even > private) modifications? http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ > > Are there licenses that allow private modifications but not > distribution of either original or modified program? There surely are licenses that forbid redistribution. As for what you do privately: is that really enforcable? I guess you can find or formulate licenses that will allow or forbid that. But a free software mailing list is really not the right place :-) > > My search did not yield much. The "Open Source Definition", the > "Debian Free Software Guidelines", the "Free Software Definition" all > require redistribution. Sure. What you want is certainly not close to being free software. You need not bother looking there. > As far as I understand, "public domain" does > not require opening the source. It means no copyright restrictions. And you want copyright restrictions. Should have been obvious :-) -- Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il | | a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il | | best tzaf...@debian.org | | friend _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
