The Free Software Foundation's Statement On Canonical's Updated Licensing Terms

New submitter donaldrobertson writes: After two years of negotiations, Canonical has updated the intellectual property rights policy for Ubuntu Linux to address a disagreement over how the software is licensed. The FSF announcement reads in part: "In July 2013, the FSF, after receiving numerous complaints from the free software community, brought serious problems with the policy to Canonical's attention. Since then, on behalf of the FSF, the GNU Project, and a coalition of other concerned free software activists, we have engaged in many conversations with Canonical's management and legal team proposing and analyzing significant revisions of the overall text. We have worked closely throughout this process with the Software Freedom Conservancy, who provides their expert analysis in a statement published today." Richard Stallman thinks there are still other issues to address saying: "While the FSF acknowledges that the first update emerging from that process solves the most pressing issue with the policy ... the policy remains problematic in ways that prevent us from endorsing it as a model for others."

Comments

Re:The Anti-Stallman Brigade rears its head again

[r_a_trip]

The dual licensing of Qt came after the creation of the Gnome DE. Before that the Qt license was "free" (no licensing fees) for non-commercial use, but not FOSS and that was the point of contention.

Stallman is OK with dual licensing, as it is up to the licensee to go with the closed license. The FOSS licensed variant makes sure that one can choose which.