> I'm not subscribed to the list, but I was pointed towards the discussion here > and would like to respond to a couple points: > > Brynet wrote: > > http://www.tarsnap.com/legal-why.html#NOCANADIANS > > > > Does not want me. > > Do. Not. Want. > > I'm a Canadian. Most of my friends are Canadian. I don't want to > discriminate > against Canadians. Some time soon I hope to get the sales tax situation > sorted > out so that I can remove this restriction, but I'm able to comply with > Canadian > sales tax laws, I'd rather irritate people than break the law. (And I > *really* > hope BC doesn't vote against the HST, because the BC PST was many times > crazier > than the GST/HST is...)
That is irrelevant to the discussion of the licence. You are confusing people with a look-alike licence text. > Theo wrote: > > I think that Colin's behaviour is misleading and contemptable. > > > > He is borrowing the preface of the BSD license, and then changing it > > at the end to mean exactly the opposite. This is a "look-alike" > > licence. > > I had no intention of misleading people. It never occurred to me that anyone > would be misled (to be honest, I'd be surprised if even 10% of people running > Tarsnap look at the LICENSE file). > > The fact that a lot of the license text is the same as the BSD license is > based on two facts: > 1. I'm not a lawyer, and figured that the safest way to write a license was to > steal text from a license which was written by a lawyer. > 2. I'm a FreeBSD developer, so when I looked for a license to steal from, the > BSD license was the first one I came across. Changing one word in a sentence can changes the meaning and results; as a result it is no longer written by a lawyer. We wrote our own ntpd because we wanted something secure. But a second reason exists. Somewhere along the line a breed of 'BSD licences' came into being that have a 'misplaced modifier' in them. We don't use any code that has that an english error called a 'misplaced modifier'; giving the sentence two potential meanings. We contacted tens of developers and asked them to replace the 'misplaced modifier'. All of them obliged except the xntpd developers. One word can change the meaning of a sentence. You failed at what you intended, and you also confused people.
