On Mon, May 06, 2002 at 01:55:27AM +0200, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
LWN mentioned the FSFE recommendation about Free Software in the 6th FP on the mainpage.
They seem to agree with most of it, but:
"Additional positive scores in the evaluation process should be granted to projects employing ``Copylefted'' Free Software and projects taking steps to ensure the enduring availability and legal maintainability of the Free Software created through copyright assignments to appropriate institutions."
LWN has often pointed out the benefits of the GPL. But this sort of attempt to create governmental preferences for a specific software license could well be self-defeating. Reasonable people - all of whom support free software - can and often do disagree over software licenses. This recommendation looks like an attempt by one group to grab preferential treatment over the others. Is it not enough that the resulting software be free?
If there is a concept to protect the freedom of the software, this would certainly be possible.
Of course less freedom protecting licenses (like the LGPL) can be a good thing under rare circumstances. Still I cannot see why rewarding having thoughts about protection of the freedom can be a bad recommendation in the eyes of the LWN editor...
Have you wrote to letters@lwn.net? It might be a good idea to explain why this isn't a bad thing.
Jeroen Dekkers