On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 03:39:23PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote: > On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 03:41:04PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > authors special consideration. Furthermore, I think the most effective > > way -- perhaps the *only* effective way for our "deprecation" of such > > licenses to be more than just lip service is to reject them as violating > > the "spirit" of the DFSG, or if you'd rather, as violating Social > > Contract clause 1 even if the DFSG wasn't comprehensive enough to snag > > them. > > > > And no, I don't have any expectation that everyone else on this mailing > > list shares my opinion on this issue. > > I think you have a valid point; at the same time, we should have expressed > it at the time Troll was drafting the current QPL. As you well know, the role of "spokesman for Debian" was arrogated by Joseph Carter, who failed to, as I recall, accurately convey to TrollTech the concerns about the QPL being expressed at the time. In fact, so far as I know we have no record of his correspondence with them on this issue. > Now is, I think, too late to go back on that decision. There is value > in being trusted. I think TrollTech sent a very strong message, and made a good move, when they decided to dual-license Qt under the QPL and the GPL. They were big enough to admit that they erred with Qt's licensing initially, and they did not lose the respect of the community. Indeed, KDE in particular continues to thrive. So why cannot we be big enough to admit that, if we have officially declared the QPL a DFSG-free license (a declaration of which I can find no evidence), that we erred, and that we recommend people follow TrollTech's example and dual-license their works under the QPL and GPL (with the footnote that many other DFSG-free licensing arrangements are possible, and they should feel free to contact us)? -- G. Branden Robinson | Human beings rarely imagine a god Debian GNU/Linux | that behaves any better than a branden@debian.org | spoiled child. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Robert Heinlein
Attachment:
pgptHoSETGdNi.pgp
Description: PGP signature