Re: DRAFT: debian-legal summary of the QPL
On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 09:23:40AM -0400, David Nusinow wrote:
> 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.
This is why DFSG#5 and #6 are fairly useless, in practice. I can't think of
any license that actually explicitly said "may not be used for bioweapons
research", clauses that clearly fall under those guidelines. Any less
direct arguments tend to reduce to absurdity almost immediately, eg. "the
GPL discriminates against the field of creating proprietary software"--it
certainly does, and almost all licenses "discriminate" against people who
don't want to comply with those terms, but we don't read DFSG#6 that way.
--
Glenn Maynard
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