On Mon, 8 Oct 2012 15:11:12 -0500 Peter Samuelson wrote: > > [Francesco Poli] > > However, asking for clarifications to the license author is not > > necessarily helpful: the reply you obtained from L. Rosen clarifies > > *his own* interpretation of one unclear clause of the AFL v3.0. > > I know the distinction. But he is a lawyer with significant experience > in IP and open source. He wrote a book on open source licensing.
Well, he is also known for writing troublesome and non-free licenses... YMMV. But anyway. [...] > These are credentials which I certainly do > not have, and (AFAIK) neither do you. Indeed, I am not a lawyer (and I do not write non-free licenses...). [...] > > I think you should get in touch with its *copyright holders*, rather > > than with the author of the license they adopted. > > I already did - many years ago - because at the time, svn_load_dirs had > no explicit license at all. Blair, the author, spent some time > contacting his former employer, the copyright holder, a company named > Dolby that is now owned by Sony. Eventually, they added an explicit > license. And they chose the AFL v3.0... Ouch! :-( > I find it _very_ unlikely that they will be willing to go > through all that trouble again, in order to change from one > OSI-approved license to another. And not only OSI-approved, but > written by a member and former board member of the ASF. Too bad that OSI approves just about everything on its radar! :-( > > I could remove svn_load_dirs again. It turned out to be somewhat > disruptive last time I did that (because there was no license at all). > It seems people actually use that script, though I do not. While there > is a partial replacement available (svn-load by dannf, actually written > _because_ of this issue, and packaged separately), I don't want to put > people through the disruption of removing this again now that it's back > in. That is why I now ship it in the debian subdir, as the whole > 'contrib' area is no longer shipped in upstream tarballs. I see. This is the harm that a bad licensing choice may cause... :-( I hope you manage to implement a good fix for this issue, solution (A), (B), or (C), whatever works. Cheers. -- http://www.inventati.org/frx/frx-gpg-key-transition-2010.txt New GnuPG key, see the transition document! ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == CA01 1147 9CD2 EFDF FB82 3925 3E1C 27E1 1F69 BFFE
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