On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 09:51:51PM -0400, Walter Landry wrote: > I would say that the DFSG uses imprecise language. DFSG #10 enforces > a particular interpretation of the language. That is, DFSG #1 does > not really mean _no_ fee, just not certain types of fees.
I think the DFSG#1's "may not restrict ..." is a superset of "fees"; it's what I'd point to, if asked to explain why the DFSG says "you may only redistribute on Monday" is non-free; I don't think there's any sane interpretation of "fee" that includes that requirement, but it's clearly a restriction. I believe DFSG#1 really does mean "no restrictions are allowed", where "fee" is an example. So, more generally (in your terms), I think DFSG#1 does not really mean _no_ restrictions are allowed, just not certain types of restrictions. I think this is very much the interpretation that has been used in practice, and I believe it's the only sane one: we clearly believe many restrictions on distribution are non-free (not all of which are "fees" at all), but we also clearly do allow certain restrictions. I think this does permit the GPL, provided that the project believes that the GPL's restrictions are reasonable. The DFSG does not give much in the way of guidelines to determine what restrictions are reasonable and which are not, but that's precisely why we have long and detailed debates about choice of law, forced distribution, invariant sections, and so on. I think this is the correct behavior--these decisions which took hundreds of posts to come to any consensus on couldn't have been correctly decided by a couple magic guidelines. I believe all of this is a feature of the DFSG, not a bug. (Doing freedom right takes work.) Alternative interpretations of DFSG#1 seem to be: 1, that no restrictions are allowed--clearly useless, rejecting most licenses; 2, that *only* fees (for some definition of "fee") is disallowed; which I believe neither follows from the text nor is a good guideline for freedom, being far too narrow (for example, ignoring the "only on Monday" example). At least for DFSG#1 wrt. the GPL, there's no need to be interpreting DFSG#10 as a grandfather clause. -- Glenn Maynard
