Re: NEW ocaml licence proposal by upstream, will be part of the 3.08.1 release going into sarge.
On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 09:47:42PM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> > If not, for example, this would seem to imply that software under the GPL
> > with a special exception releasing John Smith from the requirement to release
> > source would fail.
> >
> > I think that's clearly silly, because the same effect can be achieved by
> > giving that individual a separate license. Additional licenses being granted
> > only to certain people, independently from the one Debian sees, never make
> > software less free. So, it would seem silly to reject a single license
> > that combines the effect of this licensing arrangement into one license,
> > even if using two licenses would be cleaner.
>
> The effect is different. For a copyleft, incorporating "group X gets extra
> rights" into the licence under which the work is distributed means that any
> changes I make have to also be under that discriminatory licence -- that is,
> the licence that Debian uses is discriminatory.
It's not different.
That example wasn't meant to say "... and you must also release John Smith
from that requirement in all modifications". (It was meant to be a trivial
example of granting extra permissions.) I'll look at that, too, of course:
The dual-licensing equivalent of that would be one license that says
"GPL, but everyone is released from the requirement to release source,
and you must release everyone from this in your modifications"; and another
that says "GPL, but John Smith is released from the requirement to release
source, and you must release him from this requirement in your modifications".
The former is clearly free, and a superset of the latter: if you release
everyone from that requirement, you're releasing John, too. So, I think
calling the latter non-free is silly.
More generally, if a license X is free, it seems bizarre to call license
Y non-free if its requirements can be met simply by meeting the requirements
of free license X (making it a subset of X, so to speak).
I think this interpretation of "discrimination" in DFSG#5 isn't a useful one.
The QPL is lopsided, but doesn't force you to discriminate; you can simply
give to *everyone* the permissions it requires you to give to the initial
author.
> Not particularly. With only a slight modification to the QPL, you can get
> that effect. Remove the requirement for the initial developer to re-release
> your changes in the QPL version, and tell me that's a free licence. And yet
> everyone gets free rights to the software, some people just get more free
> rights. Because the QPL is a copyleft, that's a real problematic clause,
> because I can't licence my changes separately.
I think QPL3b's requirements fail DFSG#3, but not DFSG#5--and also would
fail and pass (respectively) in the same way with this modification.
--
Glenn Maynard
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