The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
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Re: Our social contract with the free-software community

bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens) writes:
> 2. The license may not restrict any party from selling or giving
>    away the software, nor may it require a royalty or license fee.

From: John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>
> This part is scaring away some people, for instance, the developer of
> XSqlmenu that has been the subject of the recent Copyright thread in
> debian-devel.

I understand, and I sent him some mail on the subject.

> I see no problem with somebody saying that it cannot be
> sold save for reasonable copying fees (media, labor, etc.

Unfortunately, this makes it very difficult for people to derive
commercial products from Debian. For example, say I want to build
Internet-Provider-In-A-Box software on top of Debian. Say I charge
$200 to $1000 for the product, which is reasonable given the amount
of service that I would have to provide. The X SQL package is a very
small part of what I am charging for, but its restrictions apply to my
entire product.

The purpose of Debian is not just to make a system for people to play
with - we want to have it widely deployed in the commercial world. To
restrict programs from being sold "except for a reasonable copying fee"
would stifle those possibilities.

> Note that the Artistic license (clause 5) states that:

You left out the important part:

    You may not charge a fee for this Package itself. However, you may
    distribute this Package in aggregate with other (possibly
    commercial) programs as part of a larger (possibly commercial)
    software distribution provided that you do not advertise this
    Package as a product of your own.

I find this language less than perfect, but adequate for the purposes
of selling Linux systems.

I have GPL-ed my own software, and I know for a fact that Electric Fence
is sold with Red Hat, Caldera, LST, and other Linux distributions. I do
not claim that Electric Fence makes up a large part of the value of those
distributions, and I would not dream of restricting the price that they
charge for CDs just because my little program is present on them.

	Thanks

	Bruce
-- 
Bruce Perens K6BP   Bruce@Pixar.com   510-215-3502
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