Re: Final text of GPL v3 (original) (raw)

On Sun, 1 Jul 2007 13:40:24 +0100 Stephen Gran wrote:

This one time, at band camp, Francesco Poli said:

Clause 2c of GPLv2 is already an inconvenience and border-line with respect to DFSG-freeness. This is, at least, my humble opinion on the matter. "Border-line" does not mean that it fails the DFSG, but that it's very close to fail.

Compare with the obnoxious advertising clause of the 4-clause BSD license: it's an inconvenience close to fail the DFSG, IMO. But we accept it as DFSG-free.

If you believe this, then you are misreading the DFSG. We explicitly hold those two licenses up as exemplars of a free software license, to make it clear what the rest of the DFSG is about.

Firstoff, I'm not sure the "BSD" license mentioned in DFSG#10 is the 4-clause BSD. At least, in /usr/share/common-licenses/BSD there's the 3-clause BSD, with no OAC...

If you find the exemplars are close to failing your idea of what the DFSG means, then your idea is wrong.

DFSG#10 merely states that the listed licenses """are examples of licenses that we consider "free".""" It does not say that those are the best possible DFSG-free licenses, or that they are far from the boundaries of DFSG-freeness.

In fact, providing examples that are deep inside the DFSG-freeness region and very far from its boundaries, would not be much useful to "make it clear what the rest of the DFSG is about". Imagine a DFSG#10 that only stated that Debian considers public domain software as DFSG-free: it would not clarify much...

-- http://frx.netsons.org/doc/nanodocs/testing_workstation_install.html Need to read a Debian testing installation walk-through? ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == C979 F34B 27CE 5CD8 DC12 31B5 78F4 279B DD6D FCF4

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