On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 05:23:21PM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote: > Nothing prevents them from doing so. That, however, does not affect > the *fact* that, for whatever reasons, they do not *actually* do > so. Hence a claim that they do is *factually incorrect*.
I'm very dubious about this concept. It's generally true that not a lot of money is made off of hypothetical projects. It's also generally true that when people talk about making money, they are talking about making money over a period of time, not at some instant in time. Also, making money involves more than just sales (it involves promotion, and production, and so on). You've proposed a license for a work [which I've never seen, so have not examined] makes some claim about making money, and that you have a hypothetical derivative work where that claim would be false. Even if I grant that a particular work might have this flaw, it seems to me that this is a flaw in that work. Also, a patches only license can put us in exactly the same state of factual incorrectness. That said, for the cases I can imagine involving such work -- if I cared about it at all -- it would be easy enough to add a statement of the form "while the free software foundation made money from earlier editions to this work, I don't think they will be making any money from this edition for some time." Your hypothetical "factual incorrectness" is purely contextual, and it's probably possible to fix the context that the statement is no longer incorrect. Then again, if your primary concern is not "presenting the facts clearly", but "expressing righteous indignation", I can see why you wouldn't like this approach. -- Raul