Osamu Aoki wrote: > On Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 04:52:23PM -0800, Walter Landry wrote: >>Osamu Aoki <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>>This license only gives permission when fee is not charged. That seems >>>to be DSFG1 violation. Also mixing code of GPL and this seems to be >>>incompatible. >> >>This is a fairly standard license. The usual way of interpreting it >>is that you need not pay any fees in order to copy, modify, or >>distribute. > > Hmmm... I disagree. Do you have any reference to substantiate this? > Making unsubstantiated judgment on this list is not a good idea. > > Please reread the license of this file:(Emphasis, me) > >># Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and >># its associated documentation for any purpose and without fee is >> ^^^^^^^^^^^ >># hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appears in >># all copies, and that both that copyright notice and this permission >># notice appear in supporting documentation, and that the name of the >># author not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to >># distribution of the software without specific, written prior >># permission. > > This means there is no explicit permission if fee is charged. > Permission is granted for "without fee" only. So this software is > without license and undistributable for my understanding for people who > charge fees. I think lha in non-free is a good reference for my > judgement. Can you point me to a package in main with this kind of > license only?
Quite a number of them: $ grep 'without fee' -irl /usr/share/doc/*/copyright | wc -l 324 And that's just on my system, containing no non-free packages. (A few of those occurrences use clearer variants of the wording; most do not.) A few random examples include aspell-en, classpath, curl, docbook, fontconfig, gimp-data, groff, libboost*, libpng, netpbm, ntpdate, python, reportbug, and most of X. This clause is universally interpreted to mean that the permission is granted and you don't need to pay a fee to get that permission; in other words, "for any purpose and without fee is granted" is equivalent to "for any purposes is granted without fee". A quick google over the debian-legal archives shows that this issue has been discussed and resolved as early as 1999, and that it nevertheless comes up numerous times after that. - Josh Triplett
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