Re: Recently released QPL
On Sat, 27 Mar 1999, Raul Miller wrote:
> > the simple fact of the matter is, by some trick of wording,
> > intentional or not, the "copyleft" or "viral" (depending on the
> > author of the mail ;p) sections of the gpl offer as a reasonable
> > interpretation (by reasonable i mean that it would have a decent
> > chance of being upheld in a court of law over the less objectionable
> > interpretation) that no non-gpl works may be used in conjunction with
> > gpl code (for example by linking with a gpl'ed library, readline being
> > the famous example). that covers even software that's dfsg-free,
>
> As I'm sure you know, it's perfectly legal to combine GPL and X and BSD
> code into the same program.
>
> However, what I believe you're pointing out is that: because the DFSG
> doesn't provide exactly the same guidelines as the GPL, it's possible to
> have DFSG code which can't be combined in the same program as the GPL.
> [Then again, the same goes for other combinations of DFSG licenses.]
>
> It's probably worth pointing out that DFSG was never intended to make
> sure that all debian programs could be combined arbitrarily to create
> new programs. Otherwise there are some significant programs we'd have
> to kick out of main.
[ This long discussion, whilst very interesting, has been primarily
philosophical. Maybe we need debian-philosophy? ;-) ]
It's also probably worth pointing out that *most* free software licenses
which are not compatible with GPL are in Debian only 'under sufferance',
for pragmatic reasons.
We allow, for example, 'patch clauses' and 'advertising clauses'. We
allow both of these because not doing so would count out TeX and Apache -
and pragmatically, we drew the line. We wanted to build a complete free
operating system, and we couldn't afford to outlaw some very
important software.
Most other free licenses (I'm talking in generalities here), X-style,
BSD-style, CMU-style (assuming you make the generous interpretation of the
'without fee' clause) are perfectly GPL compatible.
Jules
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| Julian Bean | jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk | TW9 2TF *UK* |
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