Re: licenses revisited

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at fakkir dot net>]

On Fri, Feb 01, 2002 at 11:57:18PM +0100, Chahine M. Hamila wrote:
> Well, if  you want to explain those details to Haydar, it seems fine to me since I
> don't believe in the concrete value of that clause. That said, I don't think it
> would prevent any of those who want to be a pain in our neck to do it. All one has
> to do in order to bar half the Arab countries is to respect some U.S. laws, which
> MPL (Mozilla) for example seems to have no problem doing despite being considered
[..]
> In fact, if I'm right about my understanding of MPL's provision's in regard to
> respect of U.S. laws, Nadim and Moe wouldn't have the right to use Mozilla and
> Netscape for example, if we were to respect these clauses... Duh.


I think there is a major misunderstanding about what is a license,
and what is law. Restricting some group or otherwise in a license
is contradictory to what is 'Open'. I don't like it. As much as I
despise .il or whatever, it is NOT what 'openness' means.

Now, in regard to MPL, it is not part of the licese, but an additional
provision of restrictions of US Laws. It would NOT have been listed
under the OSI approved licenses if those restrictions were an actual
part of the license. There is a major difference in that.

Also, That does not apply to Nadim (he is a US citizen last I
checked).

In my case, yes.. I am, by law, not allowed to download/use any
128-bit encryption software developed in the US. It is not a law
I have any intentions of ever respecting. But again, it is NOT
a part of the license.

Reading the Debian Social contract and other definitions of what
is 'Open Source'.. that 'no discrimination' clause is always
there.. and it seems to me that we would be contradicting ourselves
if we accept for a licence to have that within it. As Nadim has
suggested, I am more in favor of having this as an additional
out-of-the license type of thing. I am sure Haydar would not
terribly disagree ;)

later
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------
| Mohammed Elzubeir    | Visit us at:                 |
|                      |  http://www.arabeyes.org/    |
| Arabeyes Project     | Homepage:                    |
| Unix the 'right' way |  http://fakkir.net/~elzubeir/|
-------------------------------------------------------