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At least the following programs are currently at stake to be
licensed under S-FSL:<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.elstel.org/xchroot">http://www.elstel.org/xchroot</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.elstel.org/qemu">http://www.elstel.org/qemu</a>: confinedrv<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.elstel.org/bundsteg">http://www.elstel.org/bundsteg</a><br>
<br>
<br>
The license itself:<br>
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<pre>Scripting Free Software License, Version 1.3.5 (S-FSL v1.3.5)</pre>
:: see for the attachement<br>
<br>
<br>
Motivation for a new license:<br>
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<pre>S-FSL v1.3.x: Motivation for a new license
1. The license should not only protect itself but any reference given to the authors such as concerning their web presence. The primary motivation to publish some software which should now be released under S-FSL was to attract people to the authors web page so that the ability to remove any such reference would have been a pitfall to the developers and publishers. It should also protect to some extent against re-publishing the software at another site with higher page rank possibly at cost just with the intention to draw off traffic from the original site (like f.i. already done with OpenOffice). It is the right of the user at least to know about the primary upstream page in the web.
2. Concerning the incorporation into paid, proprietary or commercial software the license should offer a comparable level of protection to intellectual property rights as GPL does even for scripts and software not being compiled (You actually have to use L-GPL when incorporating your compiled sources into any such product. However GPL does not seem to give any such protection for code distributed and executed as source or by just in time compilation).
3. Note that S-FSL requires some minimal provisions by the distributor regarded by the author as de-facto standard and fair use conditions: a free core distribution or proactive distribution of patches, updates including security updates and fixes to broken functionality to anyone who got the core distribution, no undue obstacle in obtaining them, secure checksums to verify the downloads. Things quite common in the open source sector but not with some proprietary systems: Downloaders of Windows can not verify their downloads with publicly trusted tools; in order to update OS/2 Warp 4 some 'mean tricks' i.e. insider knowledge was necessary before I have published that on my personal blog at elstel.org.
4. The license has especially been designed for people who want to release their shareware under an OSS-compliant version for the first time experimenting to get input from a broader public community. As the original authors retain full property rights of their software even after incorporating patches (compare it in this point with the SRC M3 license) they may re-publish it under a different license like BSD or GPL at any time. It has been designed for the original authors to retain a maximum of intellectual property rights especially and also for those who are reluctant to make their software public domain in the first place.
5. By granting a group of developers to work on a new 'branch' other people can acquire similar responsibility and rights to work on an affiliated project. Free branching may be specified in addition to the license terms: "This program is licensed under S-FSL v1.3.x and may be branched for free.".
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Link to a previous public discussion:<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=+728716">http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=+728716</a><br>
note: this was about an elder version of the license; it is now
completely reworked<br>
the possibility of submission was pointed out by Debian legal though
the distributor would prefer an already known license. Unfortunately
I could not find any such license that would at least satisfy
requirement (1) as listed above.<br>
<br>
Note: Acceptance to several distributions is still pending due to
unapproved license (openSUSE, Debian);<br>
It should not be a problem to adapt or change the license yet.<br>
<br>
Many Thanks for Your Input and Contribution,<br>
<br>
Yours Sincerely,<br>
Elmar Stellnberger<br>
<br>
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