>>>>> "Brian" == Brian Thomas Sniffen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> If you want to try and formulate the "asymmetry" criterion you >> might want to consider the case of a licence L that forced >> everyone who distributes a modified version to make their >> modifications available under a BSD licence to teachers, or >> some other class that may or may not include the original >> author. What would be the "same terms" then? Brian> Yes, that's either the Charity X case from above, if it Brian> requires sending copies to teachers, or... hrm. I thin Brian> it's as non-free as any other Charityware. That's laudable nn Brian> from a social perspective, but it's not Free. So, how does considering L non-free help our users or the free software community. Let's assume that the rights granted by L to all users are clearly sufficient for a free license. Actually, at this point, I get stuck constructing an argument. I want to say something like let's consider a license L' that requires me to give my modifications to all users under the BSD license, plus some other free terms. I.E. L' requires me to dual license my modifications. What does it mean though to require someone to license their modifications under the BSD license? The whole point of the BSD license is that you don't have to give your modifications to some people and you can charge consideration and only give people binaries. That's fundamentally incompatible with requiring people to license modifications to everyone. I'm torn. I think it is reasonably free to give one class of people more rights than another provided that all people are given sufficient rights for the work to be free. The only case where this seems problematic is if an obligation is created for you to give people source code or to admit that you have some modification or something like that--if you get in a situation that violates the dissident test. It seems like a license that requires you to give some party additional rights does no harm if you're never obligated to interact with that party or let them know they have those rights. However it seems important for there to be a single license that from the standpoint of the free software community covers the entire work. Asymmetries seem problematic because they would be problematic if you wanted to fork the work or the original author was unavailable. I feel like you ought to be able to construct a license like L that gives a class of people more rights and to have this license be free. I'm failing to make the constructions of such a license work out, but the failures seem to be structural rather than inherent. I do tend to agree with you that the QPL does not allow the work to be distributed under the same licenses as the modifications. I do think that is problematic from a DFSG standpoint. If you believe that I'm wrong and giving one class of users more rights should be non-free from a moral standpoint, please explain why. What freedom would we be denying our users? --Sam