Re: Qt Freed!

[bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens)]

From: Jim Pick <jim@jimpick.com>
> If you ask me, this is a buglet in the DFSG/OSD.  The problem is that
> we now have one license, with two different sets of terms/conditions
> for the patches and the original tarball.

Note that the OSD says that with patches, the act of modification takes
place _at_build_time_. Thus, the patch is a separate work until that time.

> When Bruce and the Debian developers wrote the DFSG, I don't think we
> took this into consideration.

Yes, there is a _lot_ that we did not take into consideration. For example,
is it OK to change "same terms" to "terms no more restrictive". In the case
of the NPL and QPL, where the original developer wishes to gain
contributions to their commercial version as a quid pro quo for making a
free version. I don't see a problem with this. We are thinking about a sort
of "constitutional convention" where we can do a public review of the OSD
with an eye toward these issues and comments from everyone so that we get
a good consensus. The OSD is a year and four months old, now, so I think
this isn't too soon for it to go through its first review.
The fact is, we are tied up enough by the present open-source licenses that
we can't change the OSD very much. But it might be OK to clarify some things
and open some things up a bit more.

> Given that, I think the Qt license is DFSG compliant.  But it's as
> close to not being DFSG compliant as they could possibly make it.

Agreed.

> I think we could clarify the DFSG/OSD a bit more in regards to this.
> We haven't had this situation before, so it's a bit odd.

Is this the first application of the patch exception? I suggested it for
qmail, but qmail had other problems. Someone mentioned that it may be used
for TeX, but I have not checked.

	Thanks

	Bruce

--
The U.S. does _not_ have a budget surplus. The $70 Billion "surplus" hardly
offsets the $5 Trillion national debt.
Bruce Perens K6BP bruce@pixar.com 510-620-3502 NCI-1001