Re: DRAFT: debian-legal summary of the QPL
On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 01:53:53PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> This word "discriminate" - I don't think it means what you think it
> means. All users of the software are given the same license. The
> license itself does not discriminate against them; it does not say "no
> people on a desert island may use this" or similar. If other
> circumstances created by local law or coincidence are causing
> difficulties, then why is that a license problem?
I agree with this interpretation to a large degree. The examples in the DFSG
for fields of endeavor are explicit examples, and thus imply some sort of
explicit discrimination (such as "No one involved in genetic engineering may
use this software") rather than an unintentional discrimination against corner
cases. Licenses which require distribution of modifications to upstream
authors are not discriminating against castaways any more than the GPL is
discriminating against people who somehow lose all copies of the source to
their modifications after distributing modified binaries.
While licenses that don't require this are perhaps "more free" I don't feel
that they fail the DFSG.
- David Nusinow
Reply to: