Integrity of source code?

[Arnoud Engelfriet]

Bj?rn Terelius wrote:
> I am curious, are there any established open source licenses which
> utilize this part of ?4?

Not that I know of. I've researched this a while ago, but never found
any concrete arguments as to why this was added. The DFSG (from which
the OSD is derived) had in its announcement in 1997 this text:

"(This is a compromise. The Debian group encourages all authors to not
 restrict any files, source or binary, from being modified.)"
http://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/1997/msg00017.html

So apparently there was debate about this and the DFSG authors decided
to compromise. Bruce Perens, one of these authors, wrote about the OSD
in http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/perens.html :
"Some authors were afraid that others would distribute source code with
modifications that would be perceived as the work of the original author,
and would reflect poorly on that author. 

But again without naming names. On debian-devel earlier drafts had
a similar clause in the first article
(http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1997/04/msg00720.html 
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1997/06/msg00137.html). 

It seems to have had something to do with ncurses:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1997/06/msg00142.html
but I can't figure out exactly what as ncurses 3.0 seems to have
disappeared. 

Arnoud

-- 
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