Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 18:48:25 -0700 From: Chris Pressey <cpressey@catseye.mine.nu> To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Since the question has come up... Message-ID: <20040919184825.34bbf159.cpressey@catseye.mine.nu>
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What *is* the definition of "advertising" as intended by the "no-advertising" clause? According to dictionary.reference.com, an advertisement is: "2. A notice, such as a poster or a paid announcement in the print, broadcast, or electronic media, designed to attract public attention or patronage." Not to troll, of course, but it seems very arguable that the front page of www.freebsd.org falls under this definition. It also unquestionably *reads* like an advertisment, touting reasons to use it and so forth. I looked under the 'legal' link but only the FreeBSD, BSD, and GNU public licenses are given. Even disregarding the "no-advertising clause", and going solely on clause #2, I was sort of expecting to find a list of all "reproductions of the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer", so to speak, on the 'legal' page. Have all these copyright notices been lumped together into "Copyright 1994-2004 The FreeBSD Project"? Is there legal grounds for this? Did the individual copyright holders consent to having their names removed? What about where the disclaimers and lists of conditions differ (even slightly - for example is there any MIT-licensed code in the tree?) Lacking a comprehensive summary of all licenses, it might be a good idea to have a link on the 'legal' page pointing to the CVSWeb interface, saying that the license specifics for each specific component of the system are buried in there somewhere. In other words, a release CD image might be a "binary distribution", but CVSWeb is a "material provided with the distribution", or something along those lines, which seems like better legal ground to me (disclaimer: IANAL) Again, I'm really really not trying to troll here, and if it comes off that way, I apologize. I genuinely am interested to know what the answers to these questions are, because I think this is potentially an important issue for advocacy purposes (since most posters, brochures, pamphlets etc, could easily be considered advertising.) -Chris
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