[Bf-docboard] OCL vs FDL

[Felix Rabe]

Hi Ton.

On Tue, 26 Nov 2002 15:32:45 +0100
Ton Roosendaal <ton@blender.org> wrote:

> Yes, this is a clear FSF requirement.
> However, the fact that you are allowed to 'sell' GNU GPL code itself is 
> not very useful. You can only do that within the GPL license; allowing 
> the purchaser to give it all away without charge.

The right to sell your clothes after you wore them for a while is also
not very useful to most people (most of them give them away gratis to
relatives or into a "collection" for houseless people), but you will
surely get a very negative response if you wanted to push a law
forbidding people to sell their clothes.

You seem to be opposed to a freedom that can do no harm to you if
enabled by the doc license.

> Then what's the value of selling something that you allow anyone to give 
> away for free? I think that specific "freedom" is pretty useless, except 
> for the original creator (=copyright holder), who can do this anyway 
> because he owns it.

See above.

> Apart from this issue, the OCL has a lot of freedom built-in, and is 
> copylefted as well. The designers of the OCL wanted to devise a license 
> that could accompany the GNU GPL for non-coding projects.
> I don't understand why they didnt start the discussion with FSF on this. 
> It could have been easily solved by changing the wording a bit I guess.

No problem if there would be a OCL 2 (or similar) in the foreseeable
future that would make it free in that regard.

> Why not turn around the challenge, and prove to us in what way OCL would 
> limit our (and your) freedom, and why that isn't acceptable?

I did that already, but I will give you more details (examples) on that:

If I cannot sell the Blender documentation, I would loose a lot of money
if I wanted to distribute a large amount of CD-ROM's containing Blender
documentation (either alone or along whatever-you-can-think-of,
including GNU/Linux distributions), since I would have to give them away
gratis.  (I cannot charge for _anything_ on the disc, since it could be
seen as charging for the Blender doc.  Especially since at the end, it
really does not matter what you charged for - I got money, and the
Blender docs were involved somehow.)

Your limiting of this freedom therefore harms me.

Likewise it would harm reputation, since no GNU/Linux distributor would
be able to include the Blender documentation - only Blender.  Just think
of the Debian community being angry at us because the blender-doc
package isn't in the main branch...

> Although I respect the goals of the FSF to create a 100% 'Free' system, 
> it's not the goal of the BF, nor the incentive of most people who will 
> contribute to its projects.

But we should also not work against it if there are no important
reasons.  (The 'we' would in that case, again, become 'you', since I
wouldn't do it myself.)

> I made the copyright statement to react to something Stefano said 
> before, that people will transfer copyright to the BF. That's not a 
> correct statement according to me. Not with OCL, BAL, FDL, or whatever 
> license we will choose.

The problem with copyright is that if you have an open community (such
as the developer community around Blender), you must make a big equal
sign between licensor (correct word?) and licensee.  I seem to have a
blackout now, so I cannot elaborate on it - I hope you saw where I was
pointing at :).

cu,
Felix