Must publish vs. must supply

[Mark Rafn]

On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Abe Kornelis wrote:

> --> It's always fine to know people use my software to their
>       advantage - but I have to make a living, too. To put it
>       bluntly: I cannot afford to give my software away without
>       any restriction, however noble that might seem to some.

This seems to be the crux of the problem.  I'm new to the OSI list (though
I've been part of other free software license discussions for quite some
time), so I'm not sure how much leeway is generally allowed to "open
source" software vs "free software".  Please point out to me when I'm
incorrectly equating the two.

>       The biggest point in this whole discussion is this simple
>       fact: if I do not insert either a must-publish or a must-supply
>       clause in my license they can (and probably will) claim that
>       their source is available since they'd have to give it to their
>       customers - who'd refuse to do anything but store them
>       passively.

IMO, such an ability is absolutely required by open-source software.  The 
chinese dissident case (Imagine a group of people who want to modify and 
share software among themselves, but who will be executed if it is 
discovered that they are working on this) is one common way to phrase this 
requirement.

>       They're scared shitless to touch such sources at all. They're
>       afraid of reducing the system's robustness (remember,
>       I'm talking about mainframes supporting thousands or more
>       transactions per second, the stakes are high), afraid of
>       losing vendor support, afraid of reducing the software's
>       maintainability. I've seen some strange work-arounds in
>       my career - just to avoid touching something that was
>       made available!

This is the choice of such customers.  They have source, so they have 
control of thier systems.  With luck, they're likely to ask you for help 
(being the original author) if they decide something is wrong.  

>       As Chris said: a license needs teeth, and this one I deem
>       to be one very important canine.

It needs teeth to protect the software recipients from the software
authors.  Teeth that protect an author from the recipients are the 
opposite of free.

>       Is a must-supply (to copyright holder, that is) clause
>       preferable over a must-publish (to the public, that is)
>       clause, or vice versa.

Neither qualify as acceptible in my book.  I'd be interested to hear 
from OSI board members whether this is an area where "free" as commonly 
used by the FSF and Debian differs from "open source" as used by OSI.
--
Mark Rafn    dagon at dagon.net    <http://www.dagon.net/>  
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