> Ion ............. Other/Proprietary License with Source > daemontools ..... Public Domain > qmail ........... Public Domain > djbdns .......... Freeware > cdb ............. Freeware > > Yes, is it so?! I am not a champion in license discrimination and disputing, > but I am skeptic a bit on the assignment: DJB's software as public domain or > freeware (not even sure the latter are synonyms by the way).
Freeware only means "free as in free beer" to use. ie no money required. A freeware license does not include source, or many of the "OSS freedoms". I've seen this quite often: you can use it for freee, your friend can use it for free, but according ti the EULA you can't share it to your friends : the vendor demands they come and download it themselves from the institutional website. I don't really know aobout public domain. Guess it changes between countries. IIRC it means the intellectual property is public and you can use it. But it does not means the source is released (like, abandonware) neither the original product becomes totally free for all : in music, you are free to play Bach (even make money from it) without risking being sued, but you can't share MP3s because you still have to pay for the musicians and whatever. Anyway I've quite forgotten the details and IANAL. > I find ... bizarre (bizarre rhetorically speaking) those *double-standards* > (provided they are such--I apologize if I am mistaken). DJB's software getting > a ... *green light*, so to speak, and Tuomo's software getting a *red light* > (after all, seeing an "Other/Proprietary License with Source" is likely to > scare away enough people). I agree, this can scare people, and license problems really are bothering distributions (which seems to be Tuomo's intent). For those reading this mailing list for a long time, however, and knowing the details of the license, I don't feel like my freedoms are hindered at all : it's LGPL with added clauses, and these clauses merely states that one should not seek support or hold Tuomo responsible for outdated versions nor unapproved patches. This has been put in rough terms all over the Net and distros MLs, but it seems to me that Tuomo only want to protect his free time from hassles of lusers and distro maintainers. As he is kind enough te develop and frely provid ion on his free time, and I'd rather see ion3 advance or ion4 be created, I can only agree with that. Finally, since ion still is at core an Open Source project, everyone is free to make a fork. I guess debian already does so, by copying ion and changing just the name and possibly some Xft/Xinerama patches (I may be wrong). Then Tuomo is then no longer responsible for this, never gets complaints, and everyone is happy. DISCLAIMER : That's just my view of things. I may recall wrongly. I made it simple, therefore it does not show every side of the debate. -- Sylvain Abélard "J'ai décidé d'être heureux, c'est meilleur pour la santé." -Voltaire
