[Bf-docboard] [Fwd: Re: XFig license change]

[Felix Rabe]

I just found that this message wasn't Cc:ed to here after setting up my 
Moz. email filters.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: XFig license change
Date: Mon, 6 Jan 2003 11:23:51 -0800
From: Brian V. Smith <xfigmail@epb1.lbl.gov>
Reply-To: xfigmail@epb1.lbl.gov
To: Felix Rabe <xitnalta@web.de>
References: <3E11D2FB.1040803@web.de>

Hello,

I can't imagine why the FSF would consider it Non-Free Software since it is
by definition given away for free.
For many many years I just used the X Consortium copyright as a model 
because
it seemed to work, but lately I thought that no one should profit from
selling xfig (standalone), especially since I am not the original 
author, and
the original author once told me that he just didn't want it to be sold.
Since that copyright allowed selling the program I just removed that part.

Those are my thoughts :-)
I doubt that any publisher would want to sell an xfig manual since it has
been around for 15 years now and none has approached me thus far :-)

Best regards,
Brian Smith

On Tuesday 31 December 2002 09:25 am, you wrote:
> Dear XFig team,
>
> The documentation team over at http://www.blender.org/ (of which I am a
> member) was recently struggling with the task of opening and editing an
> EPS file using free software.  I remembered some free programs that
> would be suitable for this task, but could not name any of them exactly,
> since I'm currently not doing any vector-based image editing.
>
> To make a long story short: somebody mentioned XFig, but was unsure
> about its exact kind of license, so I went looking for it from
> freshmeat.net, and found your page at www.xfig.org.  I went on to look
> after a copyright notice, and I found that it (seemingly) had just
> changed a few days ago to prohibit selling XFig alone.
>
> Since I see that this could cause many complications (aside from the
> fact that the Free Software Foundation will call it GPL-incompatible, or
> even Non-Free Software), I'd like to hear about your motivation that led
> to this change.
>
> It is of additional interest to me since the "Blender DocBoard" chose a
> non-free (as per the FSF) license (the Open Content License) as its
> primary license for documentation, which similarily prohibits the sale
> of the product that is affected by the license, although there are plans
> to let a publisher sell a printed version of the documentation effort's
> manual somewhen in the future.  I'm still hoping to be able to convince
> them that the OCL is not the ideal license in this situation, but I'd
> like to hear your arguments for this matter nonetheless.
>
> Greetings,
>
> Felix Rabe