Question on OSD #5

[Chris Travers]

On Dec 13, 2007 6:04 PM, John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:

> Tzeng, Nigel H. scripsit:
>
> > I guess my question is if a statute says "you can only release
> information
> > to people with the correct clearance" you can still reuse the software
> even if you
> > do not have rights to do so unless you release code to downstream users
> who
> > may not have the correct clearance to see the code?
>
> In the U.S. at least, people who handle classified data are allowed to do
> so
> because they have personally undertaken to obey the rules.  No license, of
> course, can exempt you from the consequences of your freely undertaken
> contracts.


The question is whether this would be seen in a similar light to NDA's and
the GPL (i.e. one can't have an NDA which impinges on the core license grant
of the GPL.  However this does *not* mean that it is impossible to
distribute code under under both a GPL and an NDA provided that the latter
does not prevent one from further distributing the software under the
former).  IANAL of course.

>
>
> For that matter, no license I know of requires distribution of anything
> to anyone, with the marginal exception of certain licenses that insist
> on patches being sent back to the upstream licensor.  Such licenses
> are un-Free and very few of them, if any, are Open Source.
>

For that matter I would be quite happy if the OSD were amended to require
licenses to allow for private modifications to comply.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
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