[License-discuss] Open Source Eventually License Development

[Richard Stallman]

        [ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider
        [ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,
        [ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example.

    Unfortunately the open source world has not been very amenable to things
    that stray beyond the scope of fairly narrow definitions of open source.

There is a misunderstanding here.  I don't support open source and I
don't follow a definition of open source.  I launched the free
software movement.

The basic idea of the free software movement is that software must
respect the users' freedom.  If a program is not free software,
it is an injustice and should not exist.

Trying to persuade me to relax our standards of freedom in the name of
"open source" is like asking Edward Snowden to stop publishing leaks
in the name of "national security".  It's a fundamental conceptual
confusion and a non-starter.

    Thus we have nothing equivalent to Creative Commons for software that
    would cover not just CC-BY and CC-BY-SA but also NC, ND and in your case
    some kind of time delay license.

Any license which had restrictions comparable to NC or ND would fail
to respect users' freedoms, so it would not be a free software license.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.