Re: The QPL

[Peter S Galbraith <GalbraithP@dfo-mpo.gc.ca>]

Richard Braakman wrote:

> Peter S Galbraith wrote:
>
> >                                              He wants to avoid
> > someone taking his work (without compensation), slapping a GUI on
> > top on it and selling it as a Windows app or something.  The X
> > license would allow that.
> 
> But he wants to do exactly that with contributed code? :)  

Yup.  He wants to keep that door open in case he decide to do
that.  I guess he doesn't expect an email saying: `There's a cool
new way of figuring out contours, here's a patch for it's inclusion
into gri'.  He expects patches like `on line 3456 of gri.c the
foreach loop should go to n-1 instead of n'.

>                                                            Yes, that
> requires an asymmetric license.  The ones I know about are the QPL and
> the NPL.
> 
> > He was almost ready to use the GPL, but I pointed out that once
> > people send in patches his work is no longer his alone.  He can't
> > turn around, modify the work and sell it without hunting through
> > for all patches and re-writing them.
> 
> But you say below that he doesn't expect a significant amount
> of patches.  Make up your mind ;-)

Doesn't make a difference right?  The _worst_ case is someone
sending in a GPL'ed patch like `on line 3456 of gri.c the foreach
loop should go to n-1 instead of n'.  How could he re-write that
patch?

The protection for him is against having to hunt through his own
code for snippets that don't belong to him anymore.

Once I told RMS I had written something better for feature in
Emacs, and he should take a look at it.  RMS replied he wouldn't
_look_ at the code unless it was GPL'ed.  Same idea I guess.

> >                                    I don't think that the threat
> > of reduced hacker code input is an argument for him since it
> > hasn't been a driving factor so far.
> 
> Then why does he want the program to be free?  If he doesn't expect
> code input, then perhaps because he wants many people to use it --
> people who would not use a non-free program.  I think he could get
> even more people to use it if he uses something freer than the QPL.

He doesn't _expect_ code input.  I think he'd be glad if someone
contributed huge features.  It's easy to give your code away
unless you want to hang on to the possibility of selling it under
a different license in a parallel fashion.  I have written code
that I couldn't hope to sell now because of my inclusion of
contributions from dozens of people.
 
> > Is the patch clause your major hurdle?  Or the fact that he could
> > use your 0.1% contribution for profit?
> 
> The patches-only clause.  I don't consider such code to be free.
> (Notice how carefully I said DFSG-free in my first mail :-)

If we could modify the QPL and rename it, we could do that.

I will be forwarding this conversation to the upstream author.

Peter