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

[David Dawes]

On Sun, Feb 01, 2004 at 01:46:43AM +0100, Nicolas Boulay wrote:
>Le Dimanche 1 Février 2004 00:59, David Dawes a écrit :
>> 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?
>>
>
>The point is not the size of the texte. The point is that it is impossible to 
>do it right.

You haven't explained why it is easier to get multiple sets of pages of
licenses right than multiple lines of attributions.

>http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html

Yeah, but that talks about advertising material, not documentation.
I'm talking about documentation.

>> >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.
>>
>
>For a GPL binaries, it will always be the same texte. If you must add a name 
>for each contributors, the list will be ever growing (and never up to date).

For FSF binaries, perhaps, because the FSF owns the copyright to
them.  But this is not true for the modified BSD license, or for
code that others GPL but do not assign copyright to the FSF.  In
thoses cases the copyright notices at a minimum are different in
each case, and the disclaimer and non-endorsement clause likely
are too.

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