Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[David Masover <ninja@slaphack.com>]

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| It is entirely within your rights as copyright holder to push whatever
| social agenda you wish with your software license -- but debian-legal's
| position is that that will make the license non-free.  If you wish to
| require that it not be used in nuclear facilities, fine: non-free.  If
| you require that people who use the software spend a moment to think
| about the plight of the homeless, fine: non-free.  Just as, when you
| require attribution in a particular format and with a particular text,
| that's fine, but non-free.

This seems entirely too black-and-white to me.  If a license for
commercial software requires me to purchase a copy of it and only run
one copy at a time, on one machine at a time, that's acceptable to me.
I would prefer that the license allow me to pirate at will, of course,
or that the source all be there and the license allows me to fork it.

Similarly, I am not willing to accept a license which requires me to
allow the company publishing the software to automatically update it at
any time, and to pretty much do whatever they want to my machine with no
liability.  I am also not willing to accept a license which requires me
to license all works produced by the software to them.

Basically, by having "free" and "non-free", you lump everything together
into "free" as in absolutely, strictly, lilly-white, no-strings-attached
freedom, while "non-free" covers everything from reiser (free, as above,
with the restriction that there must be attribution) to microsoft (you
pay a huge license fee and basically sign away your soul).

Even if you don't think Microsoft is as evil as that, I still think it
would be a personal insult to Hans and everyone involved if anyone
called them a huge, faceless corporation.

I use Gentoo, personally, but one of my favorite things about debian is
that I can choose a level of stability -- from "stable but 5-10 years
old" to "this WILL break your computer", _including_ things in between
such as "don't trust your life savings to it, but we've never seen it
break" and "this is slightly bleeding-edge, but people have gotten it to
work".  I think there should be a similar option with licenses -- from
"free" to "microsoft", including things in between such as djb or reiser
style licenses.

Right now, there's only "free" and "non-free".  If I am human and sane,
my _only_ choice is probably "non-free" anyway.

If this has already been discussed, please point me to some archive to
read about it.
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