[POLITICAL] Re: [Fribidi-discuss] License question to the project owners

[Owen Taylor]

On Fri, 2003-07-11 at 08:00, Omer Zak wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Jul 2003, Paulo Soares wrote:
> 
> > My problems start with the dual licensing of iText. Either I say somewhere
> > that if you want Arabic without using awt you are restricted to LGPL or, and
> > that's my request, I get some kind of exception from you for this partial
> > port to java and the MPL/LGPL license can still be applied even for the
> > fribidi part.
> 
> My position, as a (minor) contributor to FriBidi development:
> I require that my contributions to FriBidi continue to be singly-licensed
> under the LGPL, and I don't accept MPL as an alternative license.
> 
> One of my concerns about MPL is clause 4 - "Inability to Comply Due to
> Statute or Regulation", which allows the software to be distributed in
> countries, whose laws override provisions of the MPL.

The logical alternative to a clause such as clause 4 would be a clause
that said
 
 "If you are unable to comply with all the terms of this license
  you may not use the software at all"

Which would seem to me to be unfair to users in a country with a stupid
law or two.

> Given the current state of enmity between Arabic-speaking countries and
> Hebrew-speaking countries in the world, such a loophole might be used by
> fanatic contributors to prohibit use of their technically sound
> contribution with text in one of the above languages, if the laws of their
> country support such a prohibition.

It's not like a contributor is going to sneak some restrictive text
into the main LEGAL file of fribidi without anybody noticing; maybe
someone could create a restricted fork of fribidi, but it just doesn't
seem worth worrying about... they are just hurting themselves by
not participating in the mainline of development.

In the end, the question probably is - is it more important that your
software be used, or that you rule out the slightest possibility
of it being misused? 

And it's not even clear to me that text in that file which said:

 "Due to the laws of country X, this software cannot be exported from
  country X to country Y"

Would be a problem if the code was downloaded from country Z to 
country Y.

(While I don't think there is cause for concern, I think it was a
legitimate licensing concern rather than an attempt to disparage
any country. If any country was being disparaged, it was likely 
the US, which has traditionally had various  software export
restrictions)

Regards,
						Owen