Steve McIntyre wrote: > Josh Triplett writes: >>>The QPL is bad news in yet another way. Do we need a DFSG basis for "forces >>>people to break the law"? >> >>That is indeed a marvelous example of how the QPL is non-free. I'm >>definitely putting that in my summary, with links to these two mails. >>Thank you both. > > *sigh* So much for debate. We've had this raised and debunked several > times. WHY does a stupid local law make a license non-free? If > somebody passes a law that prohibits distribution of source code > without fee, would you consider the GPL to be non-free at that point? > If the US is backward enough to attempt to restrict exports of > software to certain states, that's NOT a problem in the licenses so > affected. Or are we trying to make a US-centric set of DFSG now? To my knowledge no such laws regarding distribution of source code without fee exist anywhere in the world, so no such problem exists; the same can be said of most contrived examples, like "No licenses with three-letter acronyms are acceptable" :). Export laws already exist in many countries, so they are a real issue, and not just a hypothetical one. Furthermore, it would normally be quite possible for the distributor to distribute (source and binary) to locations they can distribute to, except that the "send sources upstream" clause forces them to distribute to a particular third party, who may be in any arbitrary location when they make the request. To put it another way, it's a specific concrete example of the Dissident test. :) However, if many people really do not think this is a good example, I won't include it. I am trying to summarize general debian-legal opinion, not just my own opinion. :) - Josh Triplett
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature