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Re: The Sv*n L*th*r drinking game



Lewis Jardine wrote:
> Sven Luther wrote:
>> On Sun, Jul 25, 2004 at 10:15:23AM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote:
>>
>>> I apologize if I failed to respond to arguments in your initial mail; I
>>> can assure you it was not intentional.  Unfortunately, I cannot seem to
>>> find the subthread you are referring to.
>>
>> My post may have been : Message-ID: <[🔎] 20040713080108.GB373@pegasos>
>> And your reply to it was : Message-ID: <[🔎] 40F4A31B.7000405@verizon.net>
>>
>> And said :
>>
>>   debian-legal is currently analyzing the QPL, and working on a license
>>   summary.  See
>> http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg00157.html
>>   for the DRAFT summary, and feel free to offer your comments,
>>   suggestions, or statements of whether the draft represents your
>>   position.  The consensus seems to be that the license is non-free, and
>>   the only thing left is to work out the full details of the summary.  I
>>   am currently writing the second draft, based on the responses to the
>> first.
>>
>>   It would certainly be reasonable to wait until the summary is completed
>>   before acting on this bug.
>>
>>   Also, to the best of my knowledge, programs under only the QPL are rare
>>   in Debian.
>>
>>   (Incidentally, a quick grep through /usr/share/doc/*/copyright on my
>>   system to check that statement turned up mdetect, which appears to be
>>   mixing QPLed and GPLed code in the same program.)
>>
>> So, you clearly dismisses my arguments, even if those where weak since
>> it was
>> in early participation to this, and may have missed some
>> argumentation, and
>> was already passably irritated with Brian over this.
>>
>> In particular the " The consensus seems to be that the license is
>> non-free,
>> and the only thing left is to work out the full details of the summary.",
>> Seemed a bit harsh and premature to me, given that you ignored my
>> objections.
>>
>> Friendly,
>>
>> Sven Luther
>
> If you read the original post (
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg00424.html ) carefully,
> you'll find that the real arguments are hidden in the quoted message
> appended to the post. Quite easily missable, in my opinion.

That is essentially what happened.  I scanned through the quoted message
just enough to see what appeared to be someone prematurely reporting
debian-legal's license analysis before it is completely fleshed out,
which has happened in the past with other licenses (for example, the
news sites that reported debian-legal's "the MPL seems like it might be
non-free" as "Debian kicking out Mozilla").  (From later discussion,
that was not the case, and someone was just reporting what they had
discovered by reading debian/copyright from a package.)  Based on that,
I suggested that no action was needed on the bug until after the
arguments had been fully explored and a finished license analysis was
ready.  (Which I still need to finish writing, now that QPL
argumentation seems to have wrapped up. :) )  In doing so, I
unintentionally dismissed your quoted arguments in favor of the QPL.  My
apologies.

> The only argument in the first two paragraphs (
> 
>> I don't know why, but Brian has been bothering me about claiming the
>> QPL is non-free. I agree with the emacs thing, and am working on a
>> solution to it when time permits, and upstream has also agreed to it
>> in principle, so this should be solved before the now imminent
>> (whatever this means for debian release cycle :) sarge release.
>>
>> Anyway, it would rightly surprise me if the QPL would be reveled
>> non-free after all this years of use and the KDE controversy it was
>> linked to, and i believe that we have more than just ocaml as QPLed
>> programs in debian. So i request the help of debian-legal to help me
>> clarify this thing, and either make an official statement that the QPL
>> is non-free, or shut Brian up, and let me back to work on my packages.
> 
> 
> ) is that the QPL must be free, as it has been considered by many to be
> free for ages. This is, I believe, the fallacy of "Appeal to Common
> Practice".
> 
> There are other, non-fallacious arguments in the body of the quoted
> message, but I suspect many people didn't realise they were there.

Right.  The only argument I saw was the one in the above quoted
paragraphs, and I responded to the "make an official statement" by
saying that we were currently working on the official statement.

- Josh Triplett

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