Re: DRAFT: debian-legal summary of the QPL
Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote:
>On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 07:52:14PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>> The dissident test only makes any sense at all because it suggests that
>> certain license provisions will result in bad things happening to the
>> dissident if he complies with them. I am unconvinced that following the
>> QPL's requirements would increase the risk any more than following the
>> GPL's requirements. The GPL allows some evil government to come after
>> the dissident if he thinks that it's too dangerous to give his source
>> code to recipients of binaries.
>
>Given the above, there is a big difference between communicating source
>code to those you're already choosing to distribute binaries to given
>whatever secure means you have, and communicating source code to an
>untrusted third party. I can't think of any danger arising from
>distributing source with binaries that couldn't reasonably be addressed
>by sanitizing the code in question to hide its authorship. Copyleft also
>doesn't concern itself with contributors being branded idiot programmers
>based on the quality of their code, and I find this to be entirely
>sensible.
If we assume the existence of secure communication within the country,
then assuming the existence of secure communication to outside the
country isn't an excessive leap. The QPL allows anonymous public
distribution.
Taking another viewpoint, we could hypothesise dissidents modifying
government-provided GPLed code. The dissident modifies this and
sanitises it - sadly it turns out that the government FTP server subtly
watermarked each copy of the source code. Oops. Our poor dissident gets
executed because of the GPL's provisions.
I don't necessarily object to the point that the dissident test is
trying to make (not that I necessarily agree with it), but I do object
to its phrasing. It's obviously more concerned with banning forced
distribution of source than it is with the safety of dissidents. It
should just be replaced with "Forced distribution of source to anyone
other than the recipient is non-free", and then we can have a nice big
argument about whether that should be in the DFSG or not.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59-chiark.mail.debian.legal@srcf.ucam.org
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