Re: QPL clause 3 is not DFSG-free
On Mon, Mar 17, 2003 at 02:29:12PM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote:
[...]
> because it prevents me from making modifications without granting
> everyone the right to take them proprietary. However, it is hard to
> pin this kind of unfreedom to a specific point in the DFSG.
Wouldn't this principle also make the OpenSSL license non-free?
If you distribute modifications to OpenSSL, you have to allow your
recipients to distribute your contributions in binary-only form.
I don't think there's any unfreedom involved here. All viral
licenses impose some sort of restriction on how you can license
derived works (and in fact, some BSD folks argue that this makes
all of them unfree). The GPL, the QPL, the NPL, the OpenSSL
license, and your sample license all have this property, and it
seems strange to me that you would declare the more _permissive_
ones unfree. If the GPL had a loophole (let's call it "ASP" :-)
that made it possible to make GPLed programs proprietary, would
it then become unfree according to this principle?
Richard Braakman
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