RMS on Plan 9 license, with my comments

[David Johnson]

On Sun, 23 Jul 2000, Matthew 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.
> 
> 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.

All too often it seems as if judges, attorneys and other jurists make
use of dictionaries unavailable to the general public. Since I don't
have access to them, I have to use my reliable Webster's. And according
to its various definitions on the subject, if fraud or coercion is not
utilized, then a reasonable price is anything that the seller and buyer
agree to. If it wasn't reasonable, they wouldn't agree!

If I had to interpret every software license according to what a judge
or jury may decide on a whim, then it's pretty pointless even reading
them. In such a case I'll simply use the software and cross my fingers.

After all, a jury used to having Windows or MacOS bundled with their
hardware may decide that even $2 is unreasonable for a window manager.

> > 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).

People are typically interested in the copy. The copy is the whole
point of the transfer to begin with. As an example, I spent a very long
time yesterday downloading StarOffice 5.2. If after the download was
complete I ended up with no copy of StarOffice, I would have been
pretty pissed. 

Take your last sentence and read it again. How does it help the user
that the license doesn't apply to the author? Granted, it may not harm
them either, but how is it a benefit?

-- 
David Johnson
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