Peter S Galbraith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > It's not written > `is hereby granted for any purpose and without fee' > but rather > `permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute [...] for any > purpose and without fee'.
> Doesn't that means not allowed to sell (i.e. non DFSG-compliant)? That wording has been discussed here on -legal at several occasions lately. My impression is that there is a rough consensus that we can keep such packages in main for the time being, interpreting "without fee" as "without paying a fee to the author" (which is a logically consistent interpretation of the wording). Unless we have specific knowledge that that is not what the author meant, that is. There is also an unanimous agreement that the wording is ambiguous; that it should not be recommended; and that it would be a Good Thing if the maintainers of the respective packages would gently solicit licence clarifications from the authors. > $ grep -l "for any purpose and without fee" /usr/doc/*/copyright | \ > sed -e "s|/usr/doc/||;s|/copyright||;" Clarifications in the form of an email from the author that says that charging for the act of making copies is OK, are OK and can simply be quoted in the copyright file; so not all of the packages your grep found necessarily have the potential problem. Some, including packages in main, do have the unamended ambiguous wording. Someone who felt he had the time might go hunting for the wording in the entire archive and file wishlist bugs against the relevant packages. > If I'm wrong about the interpretation, I might suggest this > license. Better advise changing ...for any purpose and without fee is granted into ...for any purpose is granted without fee which removes the ambiguity. > However, am I right that it doesn't exclude making a > sold-for-profit binary-only derived product? Yes. If the author wants to rule out that possibility GPL will be the canonical way to go. It will be a good choice unless one feels bad about associating with the political language in the GPL preamble. -- Henning Makholm
