"Greg M. Johnson"  wrote in message <44ddf788@news.povray.org>:
> ... in the sense of legitimacy to the "pure GPL in everything or die"
> fanatical crowd ...

I know of no distribution with "pure GPL or die" policy.

> Not that povray's "copyrighted freeware" model is in any way dodgy or
> shoddy.

The problem is: POV-Ray is a very small part of a distribution, and yet its
licence is twice as long as the GPL, and more than twenty times longer than
the BSD licence.

When dealing with hundreds of packages, you can not expect the maintainers
to puzzle over 40+ kilobytes of text for each package, nor expect to have
2^n different DVD layouts depending on whether the packages on it can be
sold in box with documentation and user support, sold for the copy costs,
bundled with magazines, given as coaster, and so on.

So packages licence must be classified in very few boxes: free enough or not
free enough, and maybe not-quite-free-enough-but-not-far.

Have a look at POV-Ray licence: you need written permission just to bundle
it with a magazine...

Post a reply to this message