Drew DeVault
Restrictions are not the same thing as obligations. Copyleft licenses are not more "restrictive" than permissive licenses, but they do have more obligations. Permissive licenses have obligations, too, such as the inclusion of a copyright notice. Copyleft is not "restrictive"; it does not discriminate against any field of use, and if it did it would not qualify as free software nor as open source. 10 comments
Drew DeVault
Rather than "permissive", I might refer to the license family as "lax"? Not sure, but in any case a better term would be good.
Pirate Bady
@drewdevault "Copyleft" licenses are also called as "protective" licenses, right? So wouldn't it be better to call "permissive" licenses as "non-protective" since they don't protect user freedom?
Drew DeVault
@bady ideally we can come up with some terminology that does not come across as demeaning to either license
Stanislav Ochotnický
@drewdevault I agree, but I *think* most people think of freedom as lack of obligation/rules rather than having rights. Regardless of what a reasonable definition might be.
Drew DeVault
@drizzy maybe so, but it's a very shallow understanding of freedom. Perhaps the most celebrated freedom is the freedom of speech -- this is as a guarantee of rights and an obligation for the government to behave in a way which upholds that right. This "restricts" the behavior of the government such that they cannot, for example, arrest someone for speaking out against a political leader (at least in theory...).
Drew DeVault
@drizzy in the US, for example, freedom is collectively understood to be enshrined in the constitution and its bill of rights, which, collectively, provide a guarantee of rights by constraining the actions of the government.
Luke T. Shumaker
"People rail about their "rights" without understanding that every right carries responsibilities that need to be observed too, not least of which is to respect others' rights as you would have them respect your own." -- Gene Spafford, 1993 (about Usenet etiquette, not about free software) |
Gregory's Server
Permissive licenses posit that freedom comes from having relatively few obligations; copyleft posits that freedom is a guarantee of rights.
Neither approach is "restrictive", and the latter is more free by any reasonable definition of freedom.