Must publish vs. must supply
Abe Kornelis
abe at bixoft.nl
Wed Mar 12 21:34:25 UTC 2003
----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Rafn <dagon at dagon.net>
> > 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.
--> You raise a touchy point. I'll give you two replies.
1) Any solution that I would provide would equally apply to
terrorist groups. Replace the Chinese dissidents with
Al-Qaeda members - their situations are comparable
but the way we think about their motives and goals
are utterly opposite!
2) I find it hard to believe that I should feel compelled to help
these dissidents to solve their problems, however sympathetic
their cause may seem. And if I would I'd still have to solve
the conundrum above - without discriminating (see OSD).
> 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.
--> They have their software vendors for support. They pay big
bucks for support - no way are they going to ask for help
from outsiders.
> > 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.
--> It works both ways: users need protection from authors,
*and* authors need protection from users who would
prefer to both have my cookie (software) and eat it
(resell without publishing).
> > 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.
--> Not even when there is also an option not to distribute at all?
I am not intending that *any* change be published - I only want
to enforce that *if* changes are distributed, *then* they must
be made available to the public.
> 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.
--> It would be very nice to know their opinion.
Kind regards, Abe F. Kornelis.
--
license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
More information about the License-discuss
mailing list