Re: Re: Bug#227159: ocaml: Worse, the QPL is not DFSG-free

[luther@debian.org]

>> On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 09:27:07PM -0400, Walter Landry wrote:
>>> Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>>> > Hello debian-legal.
>>> >
>>> > I don't know why, but Brian has been bothering me about claiming the
>>> > QPL is non-free. I agree with the emacs thing, and am working on a
>>> > solution to it when time permits, and upstream has also agreed to it in
>>> > principle, so this should be solved before the now imminent (whatever
>>> > this means for debian release cycle :) sarge release.
>>>
>>> Great
>>
>> Another question about this, if i am to remove these emacs files, is it
>> ok to remove them only from the binary package, or do they need to be
>> kicked out of the source tarball also.
>
>In the *long* run non-free stuff needs to be removed from the source
>tarball.

Well, the non-freeness of it is rather disputed still. last time, the
consensus was that we should make the effort, as a courtesy to RMS, to
consider that .el files needs to be GPL compatible, since no emacs clone has
yet been written (or at least is widely available).

Also, the code is free, no problem with that, you just can't link it with
GPLed code, or more exactly you can't distribute the result of the linking
with GPLed code, which is not something we are doing.

But anybody is free to make a QPL compatible emacs reimplementation, and the
source code is then usefull to him. By removing them from the binary package
is enouhg to make sure nobody actually links it with emacs code, or at least
we don't facilitate it.

Friendly,

Sven Luther