On 16-Jul-08 10:22, Nicolas George wrote:
> andrel  wrote in message <487### [at] hotmailcom>:
>> I don't know about you but when I help my neighbor I don't usually ask 
>> money for it.
> 
> Depends on what your job is.
> 
>> 		Indeed this precisely the tricky bit you left out. You are 
>> not restricted in your freedom to redistribute copies, provided you are 
>> not charging for it.
> 
> And a prisoner is not restricted in his freedom to go wherever he wants,
> provided he is not leaving his cell.
> 
> "Provided" is exactly a restriction.
yes I think I was aware of that. The point is that it does not restrict 
the number nor in who can receive or give it. So the restriction is only 
financially and not in principle. For me that is the most important part 
of the freedom, you are of course free to feel any other way.
BTW not relevant to this discussion perhaps but no license will give you 
total freedom. Even 'free software' does often (always?) not allow to be 
sold in a closed form in a way that suggests that the seller developed 
it himself. That too is a restriction. In that way every license has its 
own restrictions, apparently some are deemed more important than others, 
but which ones is a matter of taste and cultural background, I think. 
Perhaps the only way to make it absolutely free is if you publish it 
anonymous on a public server with a note that everything is allowed, 
even hiding it in closed commercial code without attribution. Although 
this license is not legally valid in most countries you may get away 
with it.

Post a reply to this message

andrel  wrote in message <487### [at] hotmailcom>:
> yes I think I was aware of that. The point is that it does not restrict 
> the number nor in who can receive or give it.

That point is not true, unfortunately: no commercial usage means that people
without broadband Internet access can not order a CD with the software on
it, nor find it on a CD accompanying a magazine or a book.

Post a reply to this message

On Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:38:00 -0400, Nicolas George wrote:

> That point is not true, unfortunately: no commercial usage means that
> people without broadband Internet access can not order a CD with the
> software on it, nor find it on a CD accompanying a magazine or a book.

Unless the publisher explicitly grants permission for that type of 
distribution as a one-off.  I believe that's been done with POVRay in the 
past.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

Jim Henderson  wrote in message <487e354f$1@news.povray.org>:
> Unless the publisher explicitly grants permission for that type of 
> distribution as a one-off.

That makes a lot of exceptions to avoid the drawbacks of something, while
its usefulness remains to be proven.

Post a reply to this message

Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> And how many contributions have there been in the past five months? - Ah,
> yes, thousands and I missed them all :-(
>
> So I can show that there have been no major contributions in five months,
> and you can show nothing about the past three years. My argument is based on
> facts, your argument is pure speculation. - Hmm, I guess I have the better
> argument after all. And believe me, I would be quite a bit happier if I
> didn't have such a strong argument...

The beta source page recommends focussing on defect fixing rather than major
submissions, as far as I remember.

Tom

Post a reply to this message

On Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:48:12 -0400, Nicolas George wrote:

> Jim Henderson  wrote in message <487e354f$1@news.povray.org>:
>> Unless the publisher explicitly grants permission for that type of
>> distribution as a one-off.
> 
> That makes a lot of exceptions to avoid the drawbacks of something,
> while its usefulness remains to be proven.

It's worked for software publishers for quite some time...

Jim

Post a reply to this message

On Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:05:20 -0400, Jim Henderson wrote:

> It's worked for software publishers for quite some time..

*shareware* publishers.  Sheesh, if I could type what I was thinking, 
that'd be nice. :-)

Jim

Post a reply to this message

Nicolas George <nicolas$george@salle-s.org> wrote:
> There are people who cut themselves while peeling vegetables: that is not a
> reason to blame knifes, is it? As long as no one significant tries to
> confuse people, you can not blame the FSF if stupid authors use it without
> being sure they understand correctly.

  However, I *do* blame the FSF from dissing (if not even outright attacking)
any license which prohibits monetary profit, and calling it "not free",
with a pejorative tone of voice.

  They should understand that some people want to contribute to the free
software world, but they might really not want anyone making money from
their hard work.

> And, by the way, I do not consider the wish of the original author as
> something sacred. The society chose to grant the authors exclusive rights on
> their work because it is supposed to help them to earn a living from it,
> thus allowing to produce more work for the greater good of the whole human
> species. But there is no fundamental right to restrict the diffusion of a
> work, just a compromise between unrestricted distribution and author
> remuneration.

  The author has all the moral, ethical, philosophical and legal right
to prohibit people from making money by selling his hard work he is
himself distributing for free.

> >   I still have the opinion that even if you restrict your software
> > license so that it cannot be distributed for money, it can still be
> > called free.

> I have the opinion that you should stop writing "free" altogether in this
> thread, and always use either "gratis" or "libre".

  I would really like you to say the FSF that!

> Let me rephrase your
> sentence:

> #   I still have the opinion that even if you restrict your software
> # license so that it cannot be distributed for money, it can still be
> # called GRATIS.

  Wrong. I still think the software can be considered free, as in freedom,
as in libre (and of course as in no-cost) if the author doesn't want anyone
making money by selling it.

  If you want *absolute* freedom, that is, that anyone can do *anything*
they want with the software, then you must allow things like including
the code in proprietary software, removing any copyrights, etc.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Jim Henderson wrote:
| On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:28:50 +0200, Jérôme M. Berger wrote:
|
|> 	The issue here isn't what the *original* author can do. The
| problem
|> arises when somebody wants to reuse parts of the original code. The
|> sequence of events goes like this:
|> ~ - You write some code and license it under the GPL; ~ - I take your
|> code (or part of it), write some more code that interfaces with yours
|> and want to distribute it. Then I can't choose the license under
which I
|> distribute *my* code. The GPL has taken a fundamental freedom
from me,
|> just because I interface with some code that is GPLed. Therefore
I don't
|> regard the GPL as "free" (on the other hand, I do regard the LGPL as
|> "free": it ensures that the LGPLed code will remain available
while not
|> restricting my freedom to write and distribute code that
interfaces with
|> it).
|
| Well, as a software developer, I *may* not want people to use my
code in
| something they make money off of, or something that removes my
copyright
| from my code, or something that is closed source.
|
| I can *totally* understand why an author may choose to pick a license
| like this - because they want to be free to see how their code is
being
| used.  BSD isn't free to see how Microsoft has implemented the BSD
TCP/IP
| stack, because the MS code is closed, even though it's based on
the BSD
| stack (or rather, it is the BSD stack - evidenced by behaviours of
the
| stack itself that are unique to that implementation).
|
| It's all a question of what the original author desires be done with
| their code.  I can see that maybe the FSF point of view is that the
| original author should be free to see how their code is used and
to not
| have others profit financially from it.
|
	You're missing the point here. I agree with you that this is the
original author's choice and his right to impose whatever
restrictions he wants on his code. The point here is that the GPL is
*not* free (as in freedom) because of the restrictions it imposes.
If people want to put software under a non-free license it's their
right (and I have done it too), but they should be aware that it is
not free.

		Jerome
- --
+------------------------- Jerome M. BERGER ---------------------+
|    mailto:jeb### [at] freefr      | ICQ:    238062172            |
|    http://jeberger.free.fr/     | Jabber: jeb### [at] jabberfr   |
+---------------------------------+------------------------------+
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAkh+XN0ACgkQd0kWM4JG3k8wEgCfe+4J7CLjHeE3gQf+JPUsTp7b
gKgAn3dNcRbzyy0EAh0zdwAlqT6Ojv51
=PaMh
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Post a reply to this message

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Nicolas George wrote:

|> 	The issue here isn't what the *original* author can do. The problem
|> arises when somebody wants to reuse parts of the original code. The
|> sequence of events goes like this:
|> ~ - You write some code and license it under the GPL;
|> ~ - I take your code (or part of it), write some more code that
|> interfaces with yours and want to distribute it. Then I can't choose
|> the license under which I distribute *my* code.
|
| (For the sake of argument, I take over the "you" character in your
message.)
|
| The whole point is that, if you took some of my code to do yours,
then it is
| not just _your_ code: it is _our_ code.
|
| The FSF lawyers make a lot of noise and smoke, and pretend that
the "viral"
| effect of the GPL is wider that it actually is. If your code
interfaces with
| GPL code, but do not contain any GPL code itself, there is
absolutely no
| legal basis for your code to be under GPL. The resulting binary,
on the
| other hand, as a mix between GPL code and your code, could not be
| re-distributed under a more restrictive license.

	Well, AFAIK that particular aspect of the GPL has never been tested
in court. But this is precisely what the GPL forbids. In particular,
if I take a GPL DLL and if I write a program that uses this DLL,
even if my program does not contain any outside code itself, I must
release it under the GPL (or go to court to have this aspect
clarified, which is a chancy proposition).

		Jerome
- --
+------------------------- Jerome M. BERGER ---------------------+
|    mailto:jeb### [at] freefr      | ICQ:    238062172            |
|    http://jeberger.free.fr/     | Jabber: jeb### [at] jabberfr   |
+---------------------------------+------------------------------+
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAkh+Xb4ACgkQd0kWM4JG3k+kagCgpPEyoiVICR0Oc4i1VVB1jjR+
NtEAn1ZadSGf9VecOMa90CgSmZ0sb8q3
=eYkr
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Post a reply to this message