[License-review] Request for Approval of NO NONSENSE OPEN SOURCE LICENSE

Rick Moen rick at linuxmafia.com
Fri Jun 8 18:25:29 UTC 2012


Quoting Karl Fogel (kfogel at red-bean.com):

> Open source does not remove all injustice from the world.  It merely
> provides a framework in which people can reliably exercise a certian set
> of freedoms, if they choose to.

Moreover, anyone who dislikes one distributor's outrageous pricing to
obtain a code instance is welcome to seek out a different distributor.
And then to further redistribute if the recipient so wishes.  With or
without outrageous pricing.  

In the general case, nothing has ever guaranteed that availability of a
work's source code will continue to exist at all (if a whole lot of
people become careless all at once).  Hypothetically, if I ended up
being the only person on earth having source code to an important
codebase, I could ask a princely sum for the first copy I was willing to
grant to someone else.  The market might vanish soon thereafter, though.

There used to be a nice little Python toolkit for doing SMTP / POP3 /
etc. e-mail, called Python Message System aka pms, hosted at
http://pythonms.sourceforge.net/ .  Gone.  As far as I'm aware, nobody
anywhere has a copy.  And I'm also fond of a small, fast MUA named Post
Office based on the FLTK toolkit, which almost vanished entirely off the
Internet when www.tarball.net/postoffice/ ceased to exist.  As I
happened to have source tarballs, I gave them a home at
http://linuxmafia.com/pub/linux/apps/postoffice/ .  Maybe I should
charge what the market will bear.  (Sadly, I probably already am.)




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