On Fri, Feb 21, 2020 at 4:58 AM Johnny A. Solbu <[email protected]> wrote:
> The moment you add a clause/Preamble like this in a license, it is no > longer a Free Software license and many distros will refuse to include it. > The restrictions you suggest will make any software using this license > proprietary, it will no longer be Free software. What the OP is proposing is *not* restrictions. The license remains free and open source. Since all licenses require that they be preserved intact in all modified copies, it is a way to use the license as a virus to spread the opinions of the licensor, just as the various FSF licenses do. My concern with it is that license texts are potentially immortal. Suppose the preamble says "John Cowan is a bad, nasty guy and we hate him; please avoid him." Well, in ten years the licensor's opinion of me may change, and then what? And in 100 years, who'll know or care who John Cowan was? One of the reasons for the non-discrimination clauses of the OSD was precisely to prevent such unwanted persistence. A particular software package (forgive me if I forget its name) had a license provision that prevented use by the police of South Africa. After 1994 that no longer made sense as an attempt to protest or injure the apartheid regime, as the regime had fallen. On Fri, Feb 21, 2020 at 8:23 AM Jim Jagielski <[email protected]> wrote: So who defines who is "morally corrupt"? Who exactly is a "bad actor"? What > is "evil"? The licensors, just as it's the FSF who tells us in every copy of the GPLv3 that Tivoization is an unacceptable practice. John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan [email protected] This great college [Trinity], of this ancient university [Cambridge], has seen some strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk and Porson sober. And here am I, a better poet than Porson, and a better scholar than Wordsworth, somewhere betwixt and between. --A.E. Housman
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