On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, Marius Amado Alves wrote: > The SDC Conditions v. 2 breach exactly clause 6 of the OSD (*). If > "proprietary" is the right term to describe (informally) a 9/10 open > source license, then OK, the SDC Conditions v. 2 are proprietary. > > BTW, that's a technicality that I believe can be solved. That is, it is > possible to revise the SDC Conditions, or make a new license, that does > not breach clause 6, and still implements the SDC philosophy--which is > NOT "proprietary". > > One way to do it is simply to elliminate the distinction between > commercial and non-commercial, and charge everybody. The reason I don't > want do go that way, is because I want to offer the software gratis to > certain uses, e.g. academic. In my opinion this scenario clearly reveals > a drawback of (the strong interpretation of) OSD clause 6--but please > this is just a fool's opinion, don't pay any attention :-) > ______ > (*) And this only under a certain 'strong' interpretation of clause 6, > namely one whereby "restrict" includes "requiring a fee".
Requiring a fee for use is certainly a restriction. It's open source if you charge someone a fee, but they can pass it on without anyone having to pay anyone anything - but if such second-hand recipients have to pay the original licensor money, it's not Open Source - by the letter and spirit of the definition. -- Sam Barnett-Cormack -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3