Re: DRAFT: debian-legal summary of the QPL

[Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu>]

This message has taken a lot of thought to reply to.  Your reasons are
convincing -- if some facet of freedom cannot be justified through the
DFSG, they should be amended to include it.  Failed amendments likely
indicate that the perception that this was an important facet of
freedom is wrong.

Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> writes:

> So, have you found something non-free that cannot be justified by the
> DFSG?  Would you be willing wo work on wording for a modification to
> the DFSG?  If you need sponsors I would be happy to help.

I don't think that the QPL requires any changes to the DFSG to be
clearly non-free.  That is, the choice-of-venue clause and the full
publication of any distributed change both have clear grounding in the
DFSG.

Before this issue comes up again with a more closely worded license, I
do think there's an aspect of freedom generally recognized by people
here which *should* be part of the DFSG.  It wasn't a big deal in the
free-software community when the DFSG was written, but it's become so
since.  It's the second biggest distinction between how the OSI read
the same text that we have:  the fairness issue that I posted about
earlier today.

I'd very much like some help in phrasing that properly.

-Brian

-- 
Brian Sniffen                                       bts@alum.mit.edu