Re: srfi licensing

On 2004-01-29 16:49:26 +0000 Michael Sperber 
<sperber-jNDFPZUTrfQQDnmTUQnR1uqEdJ8o/[email protected]> wrote:

> Sorry---you know I didn't mean you.  I meant the license-warring
> Debian folks.

I'm not aware of any "licence warriors". Just a group of people on 
debian-legal who want to fulfil the social contract pledge to make a 
100% free software operating system. Maybe you dislike the person who 
raised it (who I don't remember posting much), but it doesn't change 
the situation.

> MJ> Seriously, there is either a misunderstanding or a bug. Please 
> help me
> MJ> to fix whichever it is.
> About what?  Different people are bound to differ on whether an given
> piece of text is clear or not.  We SRFI editors at the time (myself,
> Dave Mason, and Shriram Krishnamurthi) felt that the wording was clear
> enough.  When doubts arose (as to its clearness, not as to its
> intentions), we had different lawyer friends looking at it, and they
> all came back a) agreeing with our interpretation (as put forth in the
> FAQ) b) confirming that this interpretation is reasonably obvious.

If it were really obvious, I think both myself and other debian-legal 
contributors would be less concerned by it. Now, it could be 
"reasonably obvious" we have two different samples who have reached 
different conclusions. Why? Maybe your sample got more information, so 
informing my sample with the same data would seem the logical next 
step. The other possibility is that my sample had bad experiences with 
the likes of old PINE versions, or the recent JPEG-2000 codec, that 
yours didn't consider.

What was the intention? If it was to prevent SRFI-unrelated 
incompatible derived works of the reference implementations, then that 
is surely not free software and I don't see how that can be 
interpreted any other way. If you consider it resolved, and won't 
reconsider it, then no free software can use the reference 
implementations or contain the standards documents. That would be a 
terrible shame, as SRFIs are very useful things and there would be an 
inevitable delay in replacing them.

The current licence does not seem the best way to preserve the 
integrity of the standards documents. It is trivial for anyone to 
download them, change them in incompatible ways and publish as 
"Official SRFI 19" or whatever. It's then out there, at least until 
your lawyers get them. Checking validity of endorsed standards would 
be about as easy, probably more secure and definitely easier to accept 
as free software. Users should be encouraged to check digital sigs and 
so on.

-- 
MJR/slef     My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ [email protected]
  Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/


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