Re: NEW ocaml licence proposal by upstream, will be part of the 3.08.1 release going into sarge.

[Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu>]

Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org> writes:

> Brian Thomas Sniffen writes:
>
>> Which, incidentally, is an issue.  If some user sends you a patch for
>> O'Caml, you can't apply it, because then you'll be distributing
>> software under the QPL, and trigger QPL 3b, which means you have to
>> grant the initial author permission to relicense... but you aren't the
>> copyright holder for the patch, and so can't grant that permission.
>> 
>> This ends up being not merely theoretically non-free, but a serious
>> practical problem for Debian.
>
> This does not follow.  The patch's original author "releases" the
> change by sending it to Sven (or whoever maintains the package in
> question), triggering 3b.

Nope -- the patcher doesn't release his software under the QPL.  He
doesn't transmit binaries to anyone at all.  But Sven does.  So the
patcher doesn't trigger 3b, but Sven does.

Now, that's using an interpretation of "under this license" that I
don't like and don't believe to be correct, but I saw more people
agreeing with that than with my interpretation of it as "permitted by
this license" earlier this week.

-Brian

-- 
Brian Sniffen                                       bts@alum.mit.edu