Re: NEW ocaml licence proposal by upstream, will be part of the 3.08.1 release going into sarge.
Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@debian.org> writes:
> It's certainly an issue of bad wording; if instead of "under this license"
> they had said "under the terms of this license", I'd be right. If they
> replaced it with "as permitted by this license", you'd be right. As it
> stands, the Annotations nudge, but I don't think they close the matter
> properly. And they don't help in the useful cases, because Trolltech aren't
> the copyright holder on anything that is affected by these discussions, and
> hence the annotations aren't real useful.
Fortunately, it doesn't matter too much -- to be Free, I have to be
able to distribute binaries. Distributing binaries requires me to
distribute source under the QPL, so I have to give a more permissive
license to somebody than I had. So I can't distribute a binary to the
initial author under the same license under which I received the work
from him. DFSG 1, 3, and 4 in combination require me to be able to do
this. It's not enough for me to be able to get any two of those
freedoms at a time, sacrificing the third.
> A question for you (and pretty much orthogonal to which interpretation is
> correct for the above point): do you think that the QPL requires patches to
> be distributed under the terms of the QPL, or can the licence for
> (source-only) distribution of the patch be any licence you choose?
If exercising my full DFSG freedoms and distributing a binary, then I
have to distribute source under the QPL. But to answer your specific
question: if distributing *just* source patches, then I can license
them to most others as I please. I don't think I can give them to the
initial developer under the GPL, only under the weird permissive QPL3b
license. I understand that you disagree with that last point. If
you're right, then yes, I can distribute source only under any license
I please.
-Brian
--
Brian Sniffen bts@alum.mit.edu
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