Re: Recently released QPL
> I don't believe that it is.
it's not gpl compatible in that you can't take a work that's partially
qpl and partially gpl and license it under either one. such is the
nature of the infective copyleft. (see below for a short rant on this
subject). however it -does- seem dfsg-free to me (because you only
have to give troll a copy of derivative works if they are otherwise
non-free). the relicensing issue is not a problem: you can relicense
a piece of code that once had a bsd/x license, without even being the
original author, and they're still dfsg-free. the patching clause is
explicitly allowed under dfsg, so that's ok. i don't know about the
parts that seem contradictory because i'm too lazy to grab a copy and
read the entire thing myself.
ok, that was the (at least arguably) useful content of this message;
below is an unrelated rant about copyleftage, so if you're pressed
for time you can hit 'd' now.
it irritates me that licenses for free software force all the work
derived from the software to be under the same license.
partly this is because i think it's wrong to force people to make software
free; if freedom really is superior we should let it show itself in a fair
competition. put more simply, it is wrong to think that software should be
more free than people; if someone wants to make his work proprietary, that
is his option even if i find it a morally reprehensible option. however
there are lots of people who disagree with me there, and i'm not going to
try to convince anybody here that copylefts are wrong, or attempt to keep
anyone from using them.
more practically, copylefts like the gnu gpl have a very big
problem, which is that you can't put derivatives under another license,
even a copyleft. this means you can't combine two different copylefted
works into one big work, which causes unnecessary competition between
differently licensed sets of free software that shouuld be co-operating.
richard stallman proposes to solve this problem by having all other free
licenses contain a paragraph allowing the licensee to relicense derived
works under the gpl. this is quite frankly stupid; if everyone thought the
gpl was an acceptable way to license the software it would all be gpl'ed in
the first place. similarly we can't just hope that all licenses will contain
a list of all the other licenses you can substitute. so i think (and i may
propose to the gnu project one of these days) that a proper copyleft should
allow the licensee to sublicense the product under any license that
preserves the rights and restrictions that are important to the license
(including of course the sublicensing clause). that way, if you have to take
two differently copylefted programs and combine them you can just take all
the required restrictions and rights from both of them and put them in one
license. of course if the two licenses had conflicting clauses you still
couldn't combine them, but that's much rarer.
ok, that's all. constructive comments encouraged; flames in private mail
only please.
--p.
The reader this signature encounters not failing to understand is cursed.
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