On Tue, 18 Mar 2003, Branden Robinson wrote: >> I don't think we really need to worry about whether a license >> promotes freedom; we should worry whether a license restricts that >> freedom or not. > > I disagree. Our Social Contract says that our priorities are our > users and Free Software. This means that we expect ourselves to be > advocates of and defenders of these priorities.
I agree that we should be promoting freedom. However, I don't think that our licenses need to promote freedom, so long as they don't restrict it. That is, I don't think I'll ever see the day where we decide not to package BSD or X licensed software merely because it fails to promote freedom. [If that indeed was the point you were driving at... perhaps I've misunderstood what you were getting at when you used "promote".] > The job of a copyright license is to *grant permissions*. And often to restrict them, as is the case in the GPL (linking, etc.), and many "no warranty" clauses. Don Armstrong -- "I was thinking seven figures," he said, "but I would have taken a hundred grand. I'm not a greedy person." [All for a moldy bottle of tropicana.] -- Sammi Hadzovic [in Andy Newman's 2003/02/14 NYT article.] http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/14/nyregion/14EYEB.html http://www.donarmstrong.com http://www.anylevel.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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