> >Does anyone who contributed to SANE have reservations against SANE
> >becoming a GNU program?
Yes I do. Due to similar reasoning like Michael.
GNU licensing is a good thing. It keeps things free. But enforcing it
is not good. We would be closing out some possible customers as well
as programmers.
As it is now, I do not see much of a problem in having SANE compatible
non-free drivers or e.g. binary only drivers, that might be the only
possibility to have drivers for some hardware at all.
Yeah - binary drivers are bad, but better than nothing.
As it is now, BSD people don't seem to have much of a problem with it,
but I know for sure they do not like GPL. And I assume we cannot make
SANE a GNU program without licensing it (L)GPL.
BTW: I am not sure if the "exceptioned GPL" as used in the backends is
legally valid, as GPL itself forbids modifications to it. Well - actually
we are not using GPL (but our own license that refers to GPL), but that
usage (referring to GPL from a modified license) might be completely invalid.
Any lawyers here ?
IMHO making the license LGPL should be safer ... for my own code, I give
permission to change to any license that MIT/X style licensed (without the
silly advertising clause) code could be sublicensed to. Including (L)GPL.
At least our standards should be open and useable freely for anyone.
> >A GNU program should not recommend use of any non-free program, and it
> >should not refer the user to any non-free documentation.
> I object. Trying to encourage freely-available documentation is one
> thing, trying to refuse authors the right to refer folks to non-free
> documentation when appropriate is objectionable.
Yes. There are good books out there. And many of them are worth the price.
Authors must live, too.
> >GNU programs to follow them. For example, the documentation files
> >and comments in the program should speak of Linux-based GNU systems or
> >GNU/Linux systems, rather than calling the whole system "Linux", and
> >should use the term "free software" rather than "open source".
Hmmm - isn't that again overdoing it a little ?
There is a small ledge between patriotism and fanatism ... walk carefully.
CU,ANdy
-- = Andreas Beck | Email : <andreas.beck@ggi-project.org> =
-- Source code, list archive, and docs: http://www.mostang.com/sane/ To unsubscribe: echo unsubscribe sane-devel | mail majordomo@mostang.com