Pascal Bleser schrieb:
The only form of "giving away" I know of is putting source code under "public domain". The problem is, it's not a license, and "public domain" does not exist as a license/legal state in every country. Most notably, the concept of "public domain" does not exist for source code in Germany, AFAICR.
You're right with regard to Germany. Beyond it, you can't give away your rights as "Urheber" (author in a legal sense). So what the GNU project demands from their authors (moving over the author's rights to the GNU project), to be able to defend the GPL without having to ask every single developper is just not valid in Germany and at least some other European countries. I heard that there are attempts to adopt to different underlying legal systems better.
Now, that's fine and all, I mean, U&W can put their software under whatever license they prefer. I'm not criticising U&W by any means (well, maybe: if they just want to make pine opensource, they'd better put it under one of OSI's approved licenses and be done with it, why have yet another license...),
Is there an OSI compatible license which prohibits forks? IMO not, but nevertheless somebody could like to prevent a damage to the reputation of his work by forks with bad changes.
The point is (again, I think I'm writing this for the 4th time or so): when we say the 5 first CDs are "100% OSS", do we mean OSS as by OSI's definition, or do we have our own definition of "OSS", like: "if we have the source code and can redistribute it, then it's OSS" ?
When I say "we", it's actually Novell/SUSE, as there doesn't seem to be much influence we can take on this decision (or everyone is too busy to comment) :\
Maybe you missed the mail of Juergen Weigert <20060324114908.GA10373@suse.de>? He answered, that SUSE will stick with the OSI definition for CD6 at the moment.
PS: reading my mail again, I do sound so picky... it's not my intention, I just wanted to clarify a few things, as opensource and free software are often misunderstood, it's really more FYI than "cutting hairs in 4" (and IANAL, I'm far from being an expert in that area)
I really appreciate your efforts, you're mails are always well thought and balanced. Ciao Siegbert