[plug] [OT] After Year 12

[Daniel Pearson]

Apologies for the somewhat late reply.

I believe MySQL has a similar style of license to what you're trying to
achieve Tim, check out www.mysql.org for more info.

Cheers,
Daniel

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Cameron Patrick" <cameron at patrick.wattle.id.au>
To: <plug at plug.linux.org.au>
Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2004 10:29 AM
Subject: Re: [plug] [OT] After Year 12


> James Devenish wrote:
> > You can just write your own licence.
>
> Sure, but that's not generally a good idea.  There are a lot of
> complaints on debian-legal about "license proliferation" and often
> licences are deemed to be non-free because they are poorly written and
> either don't say what they were intended to say or because they don't
> grant quite enough freedom for inclusion in Debian in some stupid way.
> Another problem with licences written because someone thought that
> playing lawyer would be a fun way to spend an afternoon is that they
> may be free but not GPL-compatible: see the article "Make Your Open
> Source GPL-Compatible. Or Else"[1] for an explanation of why you may
> want your licence to be GPL-compatible.
>
> [1] http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/gpl-compatible.html
>
> 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 licence restricting commercial distribution
> would also not be a free software licence (in which case you don't
> really have to worry about debian-legal :-P); this is why e.g. POV Ray
> is only available in the non-free section of Debian.
>
> However, in practice, the GPL does a pretty good job of eliminating
> commercial distribution and is probably the kind of licence that you
> were looking for.  It says that people are free to sell your software
> for as much as they like, but they must provide the source and allow
> the recipient to distribute the software however they like.  Thus,
> there is relatively little incentive for anyone to pay money to
> someone selling your software for profit, as they can get exactly the
> same software for free.  This applies to software derived from yours,
> too: source code must be provided and others must be allowed to
> distribute it for free.  The GPL also has the advantage that pretty
> much everyone else uses it too, even though James D doesn't much like
> it.
>
> Disclaimer:  I'm not a lawyer but I've seen a play written by one :-)
>
> Cameron.
>
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