On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 03:37:32PM -0400, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote: > The idea from DFSG 3 that modifications must be able to be > "distributed under the same terms as the license of the > original software" seems to be an important component of Freedom. I > really do think, on consideration, that this means the actual license > I had, not a big document listing all of the licenses I might get if I > paid the author or became a teacher or ceased to operate nuclear power > plants.
What about a viral (can't remove permissions) license that, among other, free terms (eg. "include source with all copies"), said: 7: Teachers may distribute the work to students without including source. This is part of the same license, a special exception to make educational use more convenient. I don't think we'd consider it non-free, since it's just an additional permission for specific conditions. This seems functionally identical to what you're objecting to: you're required to give a special set of people additional permissions for your modifications--permissions which even you don't have in the original code (since you're not a teacher). In this form, it seems to pass this interpretation of DFSG#3, since the additional permission is a term of the same license you have; it's just not a clause that you can make use of. A real example of this is the "operating system" exception in the GPL, which Debian can't make use of, but must regardless extend to others. The only difference I can see is that a teacher only receives this permission when he receives a copy of the work; if somebody doesn't receive a copy, they don't get a license, so you can't be compelled to extend a license to anybody. I don't know if this is an important point or not (what good is a license to my work if you don't have a copy?) -- Glenn Maynard