On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 12:18:37PM -0700, Colin Percival wrote: > On 03/16/11 12:09, Theo de Raadt wrote: > >> Theo wrote: > >>> I think that Colin's behaviour is misleading and contemptable. > >> > >> 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). > > > > 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. > > You're the only person who has ever told me that the Tarsnap license is > confusing. Maybe everybody else was confused but didn't want to admit it. > > In any case, I'm happy to change the license text to make it clearer; how > do you think "here's some code for you to use to access the Tarsnap service; > that's the only thing you're allowed to use it for" should be phrased? > > -- > Colin Percival > Security Officer, FreeBSD | freebsd.org | The power to serve > Founder / author, Tarsnap | tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly > paranoid >
My point of confusion is that since distributing modified source code is forbidden (as I read it), does this not prevent the distribution of patches needed to make it work? This would seem to give me personally the right to fix your code to work on my OS, but not the right to tell anyone else how to do the same. This seems to eliminate much of the point of providing source. And make it very difficult to provide tarsnip via the ports tree. It sounds more like the qmail, etc. situation than anything else. .... Ken
