On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 12:52:48PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > On Sun, Mar 09, 2003 at 08:19:33PM -0500, Don Armstrong wrote: > > On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Anthony Towns wrote: > > > If you want the possible term defined more precisely, consider > > > something more like: > > > "If you have distributed a modified version of The Work, then > > > if you receive a request by the Primary Copyright Holder > > > (named above), you must provide a copy of your modifications > > > as at the time you receive the request, at cost, to the > > > Primary Copyright Holder." > > Unfortunatly, this clause has the "distribution" versus "deployment" > > problem, and thus fails to close the ASP loophole.
> Yes, you're right, that shouldn't've been there. > This detailed wrangling is really missing the point that I'm interested > in, though. Is there a _fundamental_ difficulty with such licenses? > "If you have created a modified version of the Work, and receive > a request by the Primary Copyright Holder, you must provide > a copy of your modifications as at the date of the request in > source form, at cost, to the Primary Copyright Holder." > Assume that's interpreted in the obvious manner -- I write a program, > you use it extensively and generate some local modifications, I come > along, give you $100 for the time and materials cost, you give me the > changes you've made. Ignoring corner cases, and so forth. > First, does that cause any problems for Debian? I think we already satisfy > it quite readily. > Does it make it anything you might want to do with free software > technically any more difficult? I don't think so -- you have to be asked > by the original author, and they have to cover your costs in fulfulling > the request. I believe that there IS a fundamental difficulty with such licenses. Consider the case where a company's modifications encode certain business logic details. The information they want to keep secret isn't something that can simply be moved out of the code; their secrets are woven into the functionality of the code itself. If the original author is a competitor, or a competitor buys off the original author, any "you must provide your changes when asked" condition makes it non-viable to use this software for certain applications which are otherwise protected by current free software licenses. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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