"vaccinating" or "freedom preserving"

Posted Aug 18, 2005 18:26 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
In reply to: "vaccinating" or "freedom preserving" by ber
Parent article: The Open Software License, Version 3.0

That argument sounds pretty thin, don't you think? If a closed-source program required its files to be manipulated only by other closed-source programs then, yes, that program would be viral. Short of that, it's not.

"vaccinating" or "freedom preserving"

Posted Aug 21, 2005 16:42 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

In practice, they often do. Either you must agree to keep information to yourself (signing an NDA), or you are forbidden from distributing crypto keys, or you cannot reverse-engineer an algorithm (because of the DMCA and equivalent European legislation).

Even regular copyright seems to abide closed-sourceness, if we read Adobe's attempts to enforce digital restriction management in PDF. This is embedded in the specification for the PDF format, which is otherwise open. It is hard to see how restriction management can be done in free software, since it might be easily removed.

According to your definition, many document formats, protocol specifications, etc. would be "viral".