LWN about EU FP6 and our recommendation

[Jeroen Dekkers]

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.
> 
> 	http://lwn.net/2002/0502/
> 
> 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 at lwn.net? It might be a good idea to explain
why this isn't a bad thing.

Jeroen Dekkers
-- 
Jabber supporter - http://www.jabber.org Jabber ID: jdekkers at jabber.org
Debian GNU supporter - http://www.debian.org http://www.gnu.org
IRC: jeroen at openprojects
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 232 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.fsfe.org/pipermail/discussion/attachments/20020506/8f0a813b/attachment.sig>