On Wed, Jan 30, 2019 at 4:42 PM John Harris <joh...@splentity.com> wrote: > > On Wednesday, January 30, 2019 4:19:13 PM EST Simon Farnsworth wrote: > > But the SSPL also prevents you from using Free Software with it, unless you > > have sufficient rights to offer said Free Software under the SSPL, as per > > section 13 of the SSPL. > > You don't have to relicense software in order to be able to use it. > > > I do not have sufficient rights to relicence the Linux kernel under the SSPL > > - it's not GPLv2 compatible - and the Linux kernel is one part of a service > > I might choose to offer using only Free Software from Fedora's repos, plus > > an SSPL licensed component. > > Yeah, none of that matters. See section 1. > > > Thus, I'm stuck - I can't use non-SSPL software from Fedora (or, indeed, > > from the FSF) in combination with SSPL licensed software to provide a > > service, even if I *also* make the full source of the entire service > > available, since I'm not making the source available under the SSPL. > > Unless you're providing MongoDB as a service, it doesn't matter, even > according to their own FAQ.
And that is the most central problem with the license, and why it isn't free for everyone all of the time. The idea free licenses can have gray areas where they aren't free, pollutes the free license ecosystem with confusion. And it burdens users who aren't sure of their usage with having to hire a lawyer to find out. So the answer is, it's not a free license. We can't have people downloading Fedora who use it for building a service and then they end up snared in a lawsuit because 'oh fuck we're using MongoDB! and we didn't know about this! we thought Fedora was only free software!' -- Chris Murphy _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct.html List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
