On Fri, 3 Nov 2006 23:00:43 -0000 "spike" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I must admit that I never spotted the type of licence until after I'd > completed the work. It's generally a good idea to check the license of a work closely, before building on it. It's a mistake to believe that everything produced by the ominous "FOSS community" is free for the taking. Many "free" licenses are a lot more restrictive than people might think. > I would have thought that with a project that is fluid like LFS a less > restrictive license would be better. I agree that it would be better for the LFS project, but unfortunately I'm not so altruistic as to put the LFS project above all else :-) While I usually license the software I write under open source licenses, prose is something different for me. I feel very attached to the prose I write and will usually not allow others to mess with it. One important distinction between prose and computer programs is that the latter can only be modified by people with a certain level of expertise and motivation, whereas everybody and his dog can mess around with prose. With computer programs, forks are a rare occurrence. You don't usually see people grabbing GNU sed, hacking a thing or two and putting it on a website for download. With prose that's different. People will steal web content, rape it and then put up a butchered version, claiming it as their own. They do that even if it's illegal. I don't want to encourage this. > If you do not have the time to keep the hint current then maybe it > should be looked after by others? It's very unlikely that this will happen, because I really don't see myself changing the licensing anytime soon. If this worries you, you should write your own package user hint. You'll need to write it from scratch, just based on the concepts, without looking at my hint, to avoid "contamination", just as you would have to do when writing a free implementation of proprietary software you've seen the source code of. You're free to use the more-control-helper scripts, of course, since those are licensed under an unrestrictive license. This may seem silly, but that's the way it is. My hints are "free as in beer", but that's all. > I guess these are thoughts that the LFS administrators would have to > discuss? They are free to declare the CC-ND license improper for the hints project and to remove my hints from their archives. However, they may not relicense them. MSB -- Democracy is when the least competent have the most power. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
