Newbie Question

Rod Dixon, J.D., LL.M. rod at cyberspaces.org
Wed Oct 30 02:00:46 UTC 2002


My initial reaction was the same as John's reaction, but the OSD does not
seem to provide clear answers on this. I was inclined to say that the OSD
would require no answers to both questions, but as the poster mentioned, the
text of the OSD is not that specific.

- Rod


Rod Dixon
Visiting Assistant Professor of Law
Rutgers University Law School - Camden
rod at cyberspaces.org
http://www.cyberspaces.org/dixon/
My papers on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) are available
through the following url: http://papers.ssrn.com/author=240132

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Cowan" <jcowan at reutershealth.com>
To: <osi_curious at turbonet.com>
Cc: <license-discuss at opensource.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2002 5:55 PM
Subject: Re: Newbie Question


> osi_curious at turbonet.com scripsit:
>
> > 1.  Is there a license which specifically disallows any forks or
extensions
> > which would limit the use of a program/package to a particular
environment
> > or OS?  If not forks, then extensions only; if not environments, then
OS.
>
> Frankly, such a thing sounds perverse.  It means that the program cannot
be
> adapted for a specific OS/environment, since such an adaptation would
> necessarily be limited to that OS/environment.  For example, if your
program
> were written for Linux, it could not be ported to Win32.
>
> I can't see how such a thing could possibly be consistent with the OSD.
>
> What evil are you trying to prevent?  If you just want to make sure
> that the latest'n'greatest version can be adapted to all environments,
> just use a strong copyleft like the GPL, and it will never be possible
> to write code in the Win32 fork that can't be ported back to the Linux
fork.
>
> --
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> Entity parser dot-com                           jcowan at reutershealth.com
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