Mail Archives: opendos/1997/09/23/04:01:03
> I borrowed from from BSD and GPL and placed a suggested version of the
> license at http://www.iop.com/~patv so that I don't waste bandwidth.
> I'd like to offer this proposed license for our discussions.
OK, bear in mind that the following reaction is my feeling on what I want
from such a licence, it is not a criticism of what you or anyone else wants.
Most of it I agree with, the following are the exceptions:
> 6. You are permitted to redistribute the source or binary form of this
> software for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing
> source distribution.
I have a problem with this, in that by saying 'physically' you are
limiting their charge to that of the media, so in practice they would
always lose money because of bureaucratic costs (paying salaries to the
people doing the copying, secretaries, advertising, etc.). I suspect
that for a commercial concern like Caldera that would mean that they
wouldn't use the software at all.
I don't care if someone wants to charge $10 000 for a Linux distribution,
for instance. Since other people are free to charge $1 (or nothing) for
the same thing, all that will happen is that the greedy ones won't get
buyers (or the buyers will be fools with too much money, so no harm
done - think of it as evolution in action), or someone buys one copy
and resells copies of it for much less.
> 9. The source or binary form of this software may not be combined with
> any other commercial software without authorization by its author or
> each of its authors and is strictly prohibited.
This is part of the same thing. Why does it matter if (for instance) my
replacement of XCOPY is used in a commercial distribution of OpenDOS (or
MSDOS, for that matter)? Now, if I was writing it for profit thast's a
different matter, and if they then tried to apply a non-redistribution
clause on my software that would wrong, but if all they are doing is
distributing it what's the difference between them doing it on a separate
disk (and presumably separate billing so that it's not part of the
commercial distribution) and them doing it with everything else?
A nitpick: I don't think it's valid to say "may not be combined ...
without authorization" which implies that it may be combined with such
authorization, and then say "and is strictly prohibited" which implies
that there are no possibilities for authorization. Perhaps replacing
" and is" with something like "; such distribution is"?
(I just noticed another ambiguity - "may not be combined" could imply
that you weren't allowed to use it in conjuction with any commercial
software, so a user getting it (for instance my XCOPY replacement) and
using it on an MSDOS system would be a breach ofthe conditions. Is
this really what you meant?)
> 10. The source or binary form of this software may be combined with
> any other non-commercial software provided that the derivate software
> is also redistributed under the terms of this license.
This is the reason I dislike the GPL. If someone uses my code, I don't
see that they should be forced to use my licence conditions. They may,
for instance, want to make their code completely free (including commercial
use), or they may want to distribute only binaries (not a sin, especially
for a first release; releasing the source can be more trouble than it's
worth for early versions of software).
Similarly, if I come across code which insists that I distribute my
code in a certain way, I just won't use it. I do that with GPL code
- I don't use the GNU C++ libraries, for instance, only the DJGPP C
ones, because I don't like the way the GPL/GLPL forces conditions on
what I can do with my code if I use theirs in part of it.
(BTW, the "XCOPY replacement" I mention above is hypothetical. Just to
forestall loads of people asking me for a copy of it <g>...)
Chris C
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