[plug] [OT] After Year 12

[James Devenish]

In message <20040804022918.GL3633 at cp.yi.org>
on Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 10:29:18AM +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> A licence that specifically prohibits or restricts commercial use is
> not only non-free, but possibly also unlawful (as copyright law can't
> restrict usage, AFAIK).

(a) I guess that if the commercial use involves redistribution, then it
would come under your copyright rights.

(b) Whether the licence is unlawful or not surely depends on how you
undertake your distribution. If you require someone to agree to the
terms and conditions of the licence (e.g. click-through agreement), and
if that means it forms some sort of contractual license, then I presume
its scope could be arbitrary. I don't know whether click-through is
sufficient, but it seems common for non-free web distribution.

> The GPL also has the advantage that pretty much everyone else uses it
> too

?! Who is this "everyone else" of whom you speak? I suppose your
statement is fair because the GPL seems hugely popular. But on three
Debian machines I just examined, on average only 61% of the software was
GPL-licensed. While that's an absolute majority, it's almost half
non-GPL. I got the figure from the output of the following presumptuous
script:
for i in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright; do echo $i ${$(grep -l GPL $i):+GPL}; done
While 61% only reflects what I have chosen to install, it does form my
"typical experience". But I do not make software choices based on
licence (apart from the fact that it must be possible to obtain the
files legally). By the way, some of my installed software comes from
sources other than the main Debian repository (and may include non-free
software).