Re: is this free?
Joey Hess writes:
> Bruce Perens wrote:
> > > And in any case, whichever of obliation 2a and 2b you choose to fulfill,
> > > it requires notifying AT&T
> >
> > This is also in the APSL and IBM licenses. What was considered non-free
> > were the ones that required you to send them email on _every_ modification,
> > that was judged to be too great a hardship and this was the compromise.
>
> Hm, I didn't realize that. So what if I release a program under one of these
> licenses, and am promptly hit and killed by a bus on the way home? You can't
> contact me and you haven't before, so arn't you now prohibited from
> modifying the software? That doesn't sound very free.
Presumably you have heirs? They inherit your intellectual property, too.
One of the problems with free software licenses which require you to _do
something_ is that they assume that the means of doing it and the
circumstances in which you can do it stay available. There are a lot of
scenarios in which something major changes (the software author going out
of business, or dying intestate; the Internet crashing), and then the
interpetation of the license becomes pretty difficult.
Really simple licenses like the MIT license just don't have those problems.
You have some permissions, and you always have them, no matter what else
happens. If someone else doesn't like that, that person will have to sue
you.
--
Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org> | And do not say, I will study when I
Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will
down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
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