On 24 May 2004, at 23:05, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
But if it's your product that fetches it from the internet upon installation you don't have to pay anything.
I'm not sure whether this kind of "use" would held up in court as not being the behaviour described in the license, but IANAL, of course.
That license is just stupid.
True, and I've become increasingly annoyed with this blatant abuse of the "open source brand" by all producers of dual-licensed free/commercial softwares.
It's one of the easier, yet decidedly less-free ways to monetize on open source development, where I like to use "free" in the sense of "I wrote something cool and want people to use it". They want to make money on it, and use the open source logo to be cool marketing-wise. In a wicked sense, this is very similar to the free dogma of the FSF IMHO: freedom as a duty rather than a right.
<ot>I've been reviewing Debian's policy lately (http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-dfsg), and stumbled onto a debian-legal discussion between Hans Reiser of reiserfs fame and the Debian peeps who decided reiserfs should go in the non-free section. All this stuff hasn't anything to do with the way the ASF thinks about open source licenses, but it is a fascinating read nevertheless. If these "volunteer peeps" from Debian can withstand the urge to shift their ethics around in order to accomodate outside software developers with a less free attitude, I wouldn't like to see the ASF become more lax towards the promise upheld to its licensees: you can *anything* you want, as long as you don't sue us, and provide proper credit. Mind you that I don't believe in proprietary-wrapping open source software as well: people should make money on services around software, rather than on the code itself.</ot>
</Steven> -- Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/ Outerthought - Open Source Java & XML An Orixo Member Read my weblog at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/ stevenn at outerthought.org stevenn at apache.org
