FS/OSS license: not quite enough of a requirement

Alexandre Oliva aoliva at redhat.com
Thu May 10 21:07:29 UTC 2007


On May  9, 2007, "Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 2007-05-09 at 20:33 -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> Another possibility is that of restrictive patent licenses, and the
>> recent creative patent agreements we recently learned about, such as
>> that between Microsoft and Novell.

> Restrictive patent licenses don't qualify for Fedora as is.

Excellent.  Where's that stated?

>> Yet another possibility would be trademark agreements that effectively
>> limited Fedora users' freedoms.

> Trademark or patent agreements are a board issue, but I can't see the
> board agreeing to those sorts of things.

What sorts of things exactly?  It depends on what you understand by
"limiting users' freedoms."  Requiring certain images to be removed,
for example, doesn't.  Howver, requiring them to be replaced to keep
the software functional, and having lots and lots of them, would turn
the replacement into an unsurmountable work, which would effectively
limit the freedoms.  What do you think the board would disagree with?

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}




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