Re: Re: Announcement: Modification to the base XFree86(TM) license.

On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 11:25:13PM +0100, Nicolas Boulay wrote:
>Le Samedi 31 Janvier 2004 21:59, David Dawes a écrit :
>> Perhaps a more serious part of the "one way" problem is this very
>> discussion.  Has anyone considered modifying the GPL to be more compatible
>> with other Open Source licences rather than trying to force all Open
>> Source licences to be a subset of the GPL?  To me it seems a signficant
>> flaw to the GPL if it is incompatible with Open Source developers' desire
>> to receive due credit for their work from those who redistribute it.
>> If GPL compatibility is such a big issue to GPL advocates, then perhaps,
>> for their own benefit, it needs to be more accomodating than it currently
>> is.
>
>FSF considers that copyright apply on code greater than 10 lines of code. So, 
>with licence BSD (first version) like, you should write the name of all the 
>autors. From the pratical point of view, it's impossible to do it right.

The modified BSD licence, which the FSF says is GPL-compatible, still
requires that the copyright notice, list of conditions, and disclaimer
be reproduced in the documentation and/or other material accompanying
the distribution.  That means that potentially a page or more of text
is required for each author's copyright notice.  The FSF doesn't appear
to feel that this is unreasonable, probably because the GPL also requires
it.  So the argument is that while including *pages* of copyright notices
in documentation is no burden, including *lines* of credit notices is?

>I'm not a laywer but if this requirement is badly fullfill (only maintainer 
>and main coder name are in the files), the licence could became void. It's 
>look like main mainteners owned all the code. So it could became a "weak" 
>point from the legal point of view. The zealot could also came from SCO like 
>compagnies. 

The same argument applies to the requirement that the copyright notices
be reproduced verbatim in the material accompanying distributions of
binaries, a requirement that is part of the GPL.

David
-- 
David Dawes
developer/release engineer                      The XFree86 Project
www.XFree86.org/~dawes