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Re: ocaml, QPL and the DFSG: New ocaml licence proposal.



On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 09:20:31AM -0400, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
> Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> writes:
> 
> > Ok, after a first contact with upstream, there seems to be some informal
> > agreement to modify the ocaml licence to the following text :
> >
> >   http://svn.debian.org/viewcvs/pkg-ocaml-maint/packages/ocaml/copyright?view=markup&rev=502
> 
> That's great news!
> 
> > Changes are :
> >
> >   a) Modified clause 3a to allow for adding authors to and translation of
> >      copyright notices.
> 
> That still isn't free.  It must be permitted to remove any given
> notice, as long as a correct one is added elsewhere.

Well, i feel even less convinced by this if you say it that way.

> > So this solves most of the issues, and we need to go through the QPL 3b again,
> > but upstream feels it is a reasonable clause, and would like to keep it.
> 
> How about something like Best Practical's solution?  A statement
> *outside the license* that anything submitted to upstream for
> inclusion in the public version is assumed to be coming from the
> copyright holder and licensed to upstream for arbitrary use.
> 
> Heck, that statement + GPL would be about equivalent to that statement
> + QPL, from upstream's point of view...

Well, let's see if we can avoid it. The first claim of non-freeness of the QPL
only mentioned the choice of venue and the QPL 6c, so ...

> > One last trouble i have is that the QPL 1.0 state :
> >
> >           Copyright (C) 1999 Troll Tech AS, Norway.
> >               Everyone is permitted to copy and
> > 	      distribute this license document.
> >
> > So, this would make it illegal to modify the QPL as i have done
> > here, right ? 
> 
> That's right.

:(.

What if we call it the OCAML licence, which is mostly QPL 1.0, except ...

> > Another way the upstream author has been suggesting was to keep the QPL 1.0 as
> > is, and saying that ocaml is under the QPL 1.0 licence, except that clause QPL
> > 6c and the Choice of venue part of the Choice of Law clause doesn'y apply.
> 
> That kind of license editing by inclusion quickly gets confusing.
> It's not non-free, just painful for end users to understand.

Well, it is no worse than the LGPL excemption. And i don't think there is much
choice here.

Friendly,

Sven Luther



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