Collaborative Virtual Workspace License (CVW)

Loic Dachary loic at gnu.org
Sat Aug 18 16:38:16 UTC 2001


	Hi,

	After thinking a while I came to the conclusion that the
Collaborative Virtual Workspace License (CVW)
http://cvw.mitre.org/cvw/licenses/source/license.html is not a Free
Software license for the following reason.

General (5) 
"In either case, if you transmit source code improvements or modifications to MITRE, you agree to assign to MITRE copyright to such improvements or modifications, which MITRE will then make available from MITRE's web site."

	This sentence allows the following scenario:

	- you make modifications
	- you assign copyright to MITRE
	- MITRE releases your modifications under a non free software license
	  and publish them on their web site
	- you are not allowed to use your own code
	- you have to remove your own modifications from your machine

	I know this is unlikely but it's permitted by the license. Therefore
the freedom to modify the software is crippled, hence the license is not
Free Software.

	Do you see any flaw in this logic ? 

-- 
Loic   Dachary         http://www.dachary.org/  loic at dachary.org
24 av Secretan         http://www.senga.org/      loic at senga.org
75019    Paris         Tel: 33 1 42 45 09 16        loic at gnu.org
        GPG Public Key: http://www.dachary.org/loic/gpg.txt



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