Well, I did devise a potentially Free alternative for the infamous clause 7d after an hour or two's thought.
The key point here was that the clause suffered from specifying means rather than ends, which we have diagnosed as a major source of license drafting errors. By restricting the functionality of the program and all derivative works, it causes endless trouble. Instead, I attempted to rewrite this as a restriction which could be imposed on the recipients of the license. So here it is: "7d. They may require that propagation of a covered work which causes it to have users other than You, must enable all users of the work to make and receive copies of the work." This leverages the careful definition of "propagate" up top, so that it avoids restricting any acitivities which do not require a copyright license. A restriction along these lines would mean that (1) it imposes no restrictions on the *writers* of derivative works (2) If you've already distributed (or offered to distribute) the work to all its users (the normal case and the troublesome one for the original clause), you have no additional obligations (3) making the program available for users over the Internet (or on a local server) -- if and only if that requires a copyright license, which it probably does -- requires that you provide access to the source code to those users, according to the usual GPL v3 clauses regarding distributing copies. What do other people think of this? It's sort of a forced distribution clause, but it only forces distribution to the people you're already allowing to use the program. If it's considered acceptable, we could push to have this replace the proposed (7d). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]