Accepted Restrictions
Certain licenses restrict distribution in order to force derived projects to allow the freedom to use, study, modify, and redistribute the derived project. Some free software licenses carry requirements and restrictions which apply to distributors. There exists an ongoing debate within the free software community regarding the fine line between what restrictions can be applied and still be called "free".
During the 1990s, free software licenses began including clauses, such as patent retaliation, in order to protect against software patent litigation cases - a problem which had not previously existed. This new threat was one of the reasons for writing version 3 of the GNU GPL in 2006. In recent years, a term coined tivoization describes a process where hardware restrictions are used to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware, which the Tivo device is an example of. It is viewed by the FSF as a way to turn free software to effectively non-free, and is why they have chosen to prohibit it in GPLv3.
Read more about this topic: Free Software License
Famous quotes containing the word accepted:
“Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.”
—William Barrett (b. 1913)