Re: [IBPP-DISCUSS] IBPP license 1.0
Dear, First, thanks for your time spent around these questions. Please see comments below. Le 20 mars 06 à 03:39, MJ Ray a écrit : Olivier Mascia [EMAIL PROTECTED] MJ Ray [EMAIL PROTECTED] Most of the two above should be in README and AUTHORS, in my opinion. There is no such files with IBPP. Much easier to have everything in a single place. I disagree. The description of the software and the authors will change if someone else extends it and it's harder to change in the licence than in a README. It's much easier for developers if you follow common practices and don't put the README and AUTHORS information into your licence. Point taken. (There is anyway a readme.txt file, of course, I was focused on the AUTHORS file.) o 0.3. Authors 'Authors' is the college of private persons or legal entities, including TIP, who at least once contributed to IBPP. College? What law is this drafted for? Okay, very bad translation from a french word, loosing all its =20 meaning in english. Is it possible to see the French licence please, if that is the legally-binding version? There is no such french official version of the license. The discussions and work around it were done by people whose native language is french/dutch/german. The goal is to have a single license, in english. There is no doubt a 1.01 revision is due for translations and spelling issues. College, as used here (probably very mistakenly in english), means an implied 'group', a 'collection' of multiple people. The idea is that 'Authors' is defined such it automatically includes all the persons (individuals, companies, other kind of legal / public / whatever bodies) who at least once contributed to IBPP. The idea is very simple, harder is to find the right minimalist words to express it. This is very linked to the IBPP idea that modifications / enhancements should be contributed back. Such contributors become de- facto members of that 'Authors' group. hereby grant the following permissions, free of charge, to any =20 private person or legal entity (hereafter \You\): Permission not granted to public legal entities (UK =3D plcs, royal =20= charter corporations IIRC). Breaks DFSG 5 (No Discrimination Against =20 Persons) or 6 (No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavour). You read it: to any private (person or legal) entity. Intent was: to any (private person) or (legal entity). A 'legal entity' includes a 'public legal entity' as well a 'private =20 legal entity', isn't it? [...] I think this might be just 'legal person' (as a company is a type of person to the law, just not a natural person), but I am not a lawyer. So, that wording is merely ambiguous at the moment, not a deliberate attempt to exclude public companies. Right, happy we agree. And yes, it will be rewritten to remove ambiguity. o 2.1. Right to Use To use (edit when required, compile and link) the IBPP source code as part of a larger programming work which effectively =20= makes use of some or all of the functionnalities offered by IBPP. Restriction on use: we might not agree that something is effectively making use. Lawyerbomb, possibly breaking DFSG 3 (Derived Works). The final part which effectively makes use of some or all of the functionalities offered by IBPP might be simply dropped. That is not something really important. Who would find ways to 'use' the code without actually calling it? You'd be surprised. Some people print this stuff on t-shirts. Dropping that and programming would solve this. So that would become: 2.1. Right to Use To use (edit when required, compile and link) the IBPP source code as part of a larger work. * 3. Duties o 3.1. Duty to give modifications back to IBPP Authors Any modification or addition done to IBPP will be =20 submitted to the Authors, so that those modifications or additions can be reviewed, possibly modified or fixed, and eventually merged in a new version of IBPP, if the modification is found by the Authors to be of interest to the IBPP users community. Forced donation upstream of work. I regard this as a payment or royalty on derived works, breaking DFSG 1 (Free Redistribution). I know others disagree, but I don't understand their reasoning. Forced donation, indeed. But not a payment or a royalty. Matter of =20 reasoning. The authors would simply appreciate to see their 'baby' =20 benefit from some of the enhancements other people might develop: for =20= the benefit of the community of users. It's one thing to release some =20= code in the wild without any consideration to what will happen in the =20= future, it is another to be responsible and to look for opportunities =20= to centralize the evolutions / modifications so that the code can =20 mature. I don't see why free software should allow the original licensor to demand the fruits of the labour of
Re: Results for Debian's Position on the GFDL
Raul Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] For example, taking some GFDL'd documentation, embedding it in an executable, then making it available to users of a multi-user system with read and write permissions disabled (and only granting execute permissions) would constitute a violation of the GFDL if additional steps were not also taken to keep this legal (for example: granting users access to a debian ftp archive). Is parallel distribution of an uncontrolled copy acceptable? I don't see how that isn't controlling the controlled copy in a way that falls afoul of the licence. But so what? We don't require that we protect users from ever doing something bad. [...] We also require that licences don't try to stop users from ever doing something bad, such as operating nuclear missiles. During the normal course of execution of a program, you need to make numerous copies of a program. One for memory, one for swap, one for L2 cache, numerous small ones for L1 cache, ... [...] In the specific case, I'm saying that such copying to L2 cache is not covered by the GFDL. The GFDL does not specifically prohibit such copying. The FDL would be a terrible licence for programs, but such copying is necessarily covered by copyright and the FDL covers it: it just leaves the defaults in place. (If English law defaults were changed badly on this, I'd probably agree with calling it a basket-case and ignoring much of it for the purposes of review here, as seemingly advocated.) It's interesting that the U.K. will remove permissions that are present without any explicit permission when explicit permission is granted, I think that's a misunderstanding, but irrelevant as you say. -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/ Please follow http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FYI: Savannah seems to reject GPLv2 only projects
Francesco Poli [EMAIL PROTECTED] Quote: We cannot accept GPLv2 only. That's dumb. Of course they *can*. They just don't want to. So, Savannah rejects free software now, just because some developers don't want to let people weld adverts into their manuals? Shame. [...] Other similar project-hosting services? Alioth and tuxfamily, OTTOMH. I don't know if David Desrosiers still offers hosting. Long term, hosting it yourself under a distributed RCS and using something like DOAP to keep project metadata seems the best bet. If others would like to help document the tools and methods, please let me know and we can make it a proof-of-concept project, hack support into existing hosts and that sort of thing. I had a bit of an attempt with coopX some years ago, but it was too early and didn't take off. -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/ Please follow http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: better licence for fosdem, debconf, .., videos...
Francesco Poli [EMAIL PROTECTED] I'm puzzled: how can you say that Bob had no part in the *derived* work? He took no part in creating the new work from it. Does Linus Torvalds have no part in linux-image-2.6-*.deb? Debian Linux kernels are different from official kernel.org ones, but that doesn't mean that upstream have no part in them! I don't think Linus Torvalds helps create the deb packaging. One can say it contains his work, but kernel-image-2.6.8-2-386.deb by the Debian kernel team and Linus Torvalds may not be a strictly accurate credit. I think this may be part of the reason for the particular wording of the old BSD ad clause. Or am I misreading what you wrote? Maybe. CC-Scotland-by-2.5 is an acceptable licence that corrects the DFSG failures of CC-generic-by-2.5. I have to disagree. OK. At the very least (even if we conclude that requiring to remove credit upon request is acceptable), CC-by-2.5/scotland still has the following other issues: * the any comparable authorship credit lawyerbomb * the sue me in Scotland problem I strongly suggest to adopt clearly DFSG-free licenses that don't have issues in the first place, rather than choosing a license with more or less small issues that must be cured. I agree with that advice. Some licensors have drunk CC deeply and will not move, so I suggest that CC-sco is a possible compromise route until a fixed CC 3.x is finally published. -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/ Please follow http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Daniel Wallace case vs. FSF thrown out, ordered to pay costs
Well, you could have won EURO 50. Wanna bet whether Wallace will appeal and/or file Rule 60 Motion first? I bet EURO 50 that he will. Who's playing? regards, alexander.
Re: BOLA licence (darcsweb): free or not?
On Sun, Jan 08, 2006 at 08:08:50PM +0100, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote: It seems DFSG-free to me but who knows? I don't like licenses, because I don't like having to worry about all this legal stuff just for a simple piece of software I don't really mind anyone using. But I also believe that it's important that people share and give back; so I'm placing darcsweb under the following license, so you feel guilty if you don't ;) Uh oh, that may be a claim that not donating is immoral, unethical, illegal or something similar! http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-pkgcopyright BOLA - Buena Onda License Agreement --- This work is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this work. To all effects and purposes, this work is to be considered Public Domain. Some would complain that this doesn't give explicit permission to modify and/or distribute, and the typical suggestion is to use either the MIT license (liberal) or GPLv2 (copyleft) as per preference. Justin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: RFH: Non-free files in Emacs
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Nathanael Nerode) writes: Files in the /etc directory of emacs21 which may be legally problematic follow. Thank you very much. This is an impressive piece of work. I'll take some time to read it cautiously and come back if any question. Cheers, -- Jérôme Marant
Re: Results for Debian's Position on the GFDL
On 3/22/06, MJ Ray [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Raul Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] For example, taking some GFDL'd documentation, embedding it in an executable, then making it available to users of a multi-user system with read and write permissions disabled (and only granting execute permissions) would constitute a violation of the GFDL if additional steps were not also taken to keep this legal (for example: granting users access to a debian ftp archive). Is parallel distribution of an uncontrolled copy acceptable? I don't see how that isn't controlling the controlled copy in a way that falls afoul of the licence. I'm not sure, I've not thought through that case. My point was: these cases only coincidentally involve the use of commonly used facilities. It's not the use of the facilities, in and of themselves, which are prohibited. But so what? We don't require that we protect users from ever doing something bad. [...] We also require that licences don't try to stop users from ever doing something bad, such as operating nuclear missiles. We require that licenses don't discriminate against fields of endeavor, but we have never considered the right to distribute this free software in a non-free fashion a field of endeavor. -- Raul
Re: BOLA licence (darcsweb): free or not?
From the BOLA license: To all effects and purposes, this work is to be considered Public Domain. Justin Pryzby wrote: Some would complain that this doesn't give explicit permission to modify and/or distribute, and the typical suggestion is to use either the MIT license (liberal) or GPLv2 (copyleft) as per preference. I think the only plausible interpretation of this sentence -- at least, the only interpretation I can come up with -- is that the author gives you the right to do anything with the work that you could do with a public domain work. That includes permission to modify and/or distribute. That's a free license. Sorry again about the thread-break.
