Re: [taupin@lps.u-psud.fr: Re: MusiXTeX T.75 on Debian GNU/Linux]

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Anthony Fok <foka@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca> quotes Daniel Taupin:

|     [Daniel Taupin:]
| > > Exact: MusiXTeX if freeware, you can give it, not sell it. But if
| > > included in another package you sell, no problem. But the cos with and
| > > withour MusiXTeX must be the same!
| > 
|   [Anthony Fok:]
| > Okay.  :)  (Although someone may argue that MusiXTeX does contribute to
| > the value of the CD.  <grin>)
| 
| The question is: if you sell MusiXTeX alone, I do not agree. But value
| added if no problem.

I think this is non-free by the DFSG, and I think there are good
reasons for the DFSG to disallow such licenses:

Imagine that I run a Debian system on the only computer in a village
somewhere in central Africa where the nearest internet connection is
hundreds of miles away.

I might want to contract with a service company to send me fresh debs
of the packages I have installed, on floppy disks, whenever they get
updated.

However, if main contained packages with "you may not charge money for
shipping this program alone", the service company would not be able to
bill me for their service lest some week the only relevant new upload
happened to be a new version of MusiXTeX.

This would mean that the service would probably not be available to
me, or at least that I could only have it if I also paid the service
company for having a lawyer scan the license terms of every uploaded
package to see if they were allowed to send it to me---which would
make it prohibitively expensive.

-- 
Henning Makholm