FS/OSS license: not quite enough of a requirement

[Alexandre Oliva]

On May 10, 2007, "Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 20:26 -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> > It is implicit in the "only licenses approved by the FSF or OSI are OK
>> > for Fedora".
>> 
>> I'm afraid it isn't.  AFAIK GPLv3 will be the first Free Software
>> license to stop the kind of practice I'm alluding to.

> Well, I doubt we will move to a "only GPLv3" licensing policy anytime in
> the near future.

Do you realize that the decision to respect user's freedoms doesn't
imply selecting one particular license that demands you to do that?

Consider a liberal license such as the MIT license.

It doesn't require you to pass on source code.

But you can do it, even if you could also choose not to do so.

And if you commit to do it, people will know you'll do it, even if you
didn't have to.

This is precisely what I've been trying to talk about since I started
this thread.  I don't understand why this has been so hard to
communicate :-(

It's not about what the license demands, or lets us do.

It's about what we promise our users we're going to deliver them, even
if the license doesn't demand it from us.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}