On Sun, May 02, 2004 at 05:05:34PM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote: > > I wonder why we considered clause #4 to be free; it seems a little > > overreaching. > > It prohibits code reuse with any projects with names like "Vocal Minority" > > or > > "Vocalize". (This isn't an objection; just curiosity.) > > The DFSG justification is based on DFSG 4, which states that "The > license may require derived works to carry a different name or version > number from the original software." As for _why_ we allow that, I think > it is based on the idea of avoiding misrepresentation: anyone should be > free to create a forked version of a piece of Free Software, but > attempting to pass it off as the original is misrepresentation. Users > should always know what they are getting, and be able to make a reasoned > choice as to where they get their software from.
As a weak opinion, I think that saying "our name can not be a substring of your name" does not fall under the "no false representation" part of DFSG#4. As a more extreme case, would a program called "Net" carrying the requirement "... nor may 'Net' appear in their name" be considered free? I think this particular wording is a bit overbroad. I might feel more strongly about this if I was, say, forking some third party audio application, calling it "Vocalize", and wanted to reuse code from "Vocal". (I'm not, though, and there are more important battles right now ...) -- Glenn Maynard
