Re: [ProgSoc] PINE Being Free?

[Anand Kumria <wildfire@nospam.progsoc.uts.edu.au>]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2002 at 10:31:46AM +1000, Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale wrote:
> At 10:12pm on the 17th of April, Anand Kumria wrote:
> 
> > As well as restricting distributing modified binaries it also restricts
> > binaries on the same media. So if you are selling a CD (or giving a friend
> > a floppy disk) the license of the software must be compatible [*] with Pine.
> 
> The licenses of included software do not have to be compatible with the Pine
> license. They must be of a type allowed by the Pine license, however.
> Specifically, they must be "free of charge, non-proprietary, or
> shareware". 

So the Pine license adds the requirements that whatever is on the same CD
as it must be "free of charge, non-proprietary, or shareware".

As matt has pointed out the GPL is _none_ of these. 

> You can even charge for the CD. This explicitly covers
> everything in debian-main. Including Pine in a CD which also contains the
> archives of debian-non-free falls under option 1 of the distribution clause,
> which states "Redistribution of this release is permitted... In
> free-of-charge or at-cost distributions by non-profit concerns".
> 
> In plain English: you can make a CD containing Mozilla, GCC, Emacs, Python,
> Perl and Pine and charge hundreds of dollars for it and not violate any
> license. 

No. In plain English you can not do this. If you do you are violating both
the GPL and the Pine licences. Please have another read of the licence.

> The fundamental intent of the license is that you can do what you like with
> the software on your own system as long as it's labelled as modified, you
> can't distribute the binaries, and you can't sell it with commercial apps on
> a CD. That's not Free according to Debian's guidelines or the FSF, but it's
> pretty free, and Progsoc's use of it is perfectly appropriate.
> 
> Computer scientists spend way too much time fussing over licenses.

You ignore them at your own peril. 

anand

-- 
 `` We are shaped by our thoughts, we become what we think.
 When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never
 leaves. '' -- Buddha, The Dhammapada

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