RMS on Plan 9 license, with my comments

[Matthew Weigel]

[sorry I'm using a different account, it's a little more convenient]

On Sun, 23 Jul 2000, David Johnson wrote:

> On Sun, 23 Jul 2000, Matthew C. Weigel wrote:
> 
> The clause in question does not state that Lucent gets to decide what
> is "reasonable". For all intents and purposes, if a buyer and a sell
> agree on a price, it is reasonable. As such, it is a meaningless
> adjective.

Is it meaningless?  Or is that simply your analysis?  Myself, I hesitate
to label portions of licenses as 'meaningless' without legal counsel.

You are trying to treat the license as a cut and dried technical
statement, and it's not; its application includes jurisdiction,
precedence, judge, and jury.  Any one of those can make a decision about
what 'reasonable' means.

If 'reasonable' were struck out, at least there wouldn't be an explicit
encouragement to interpret what sort of fees are legally acceptable.

> On the other hand, to be nit-picky about it, the GPL only allows you to
> charge for transferring a copy, or for supplying a warranty. I can't
> sell the copy itself, nor can I charge for the media. 

Which is good.  The transfer is what people are actually interested in,
anyways.  Keep in mind, these licenses don't apply to the original author,
so the license helps licensees (users and developers).