FS/OSS license: not quite enough of a requirement

[Alexandre Oliva]

On May 10, 2007, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at jdub.homelinux.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 21:05 -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:

>> Yeah, and it's in the definition of Free Software.  And if *we* can
>> enjoy the freedoms, it's Free Software for us.  And if software
>> complies with all the criteria set forth in the OSD, then it's OSS for
>> us.
>> 
>> But where do we state that it's going to remain so for our users?

> _Fedora_ doesn't have to.  _Fedora_ cannot change the licenses of the
> packages we ship.

But we don't have to change the license to do that.

> Those licenses dictate that we cannot remove the
> freedoms granted to the users.

No, they don't.  Only a few of htem do.

Remember that not all Free Software licenses require corresponding
source code to be offered along with the binaries.


But then, when binaries are distributed without source code, the
software is no longer free for the recipient, even if it's still under
the same Free Software license.

Capisce?

> It is _inherent_ in the licensing we choose for acceptance into Fedora.

No, it's not, and this is *exactly* the point I'm trying to make.

I don't see anything in Fedora policies today that would stop us from
telling a user: here, take this MIT-licensed binary; no, we're not
going to give you the sources for our build; no, we're not even going
to tell you whether we modified it.

It is Free Software for us, but not for our users.

The most important thing is that it's Free Software for our users.

>> The Fedora Project is publicly committed to respecting its users' four
>> freedoms. 

> What four freedoms would those be?  You don't list them below.

Those in the Free Software definition, linked from our front page, of
course.  If this was html, wiki or some other representation that
enabled marking up of links, I'd have added a link to the FSD.

> This is something that would need approval from the Board.

Of course.

> As Tom already said, I doubt the Board would blindly make such a
> statement.

He actually said something else ;-)  I'm happy I was not the only one
who misunderstood it.

-- 
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}