Re: NEW ocaml licence proposal by upstream, will be part of the 3.08.1 release going into sarge.
On Fri, Aug 20, 2004 at 03:03:36PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > But a requirement that I provide permissions over-and-above the
> > freedoms I had is non-free.
>
> Do you believe that this is non-free because of philosophical reasons,
> or because DFSG 3 says so? I recognise that this is what DFSG 3 appears
> to claim, but on re-reading the debian-private thread which shaped the
> social contract I'm becoming increasingly convinced that that's not its
> intention. I'd be interested to hear arguments for why DFSG 3 /should/
> mean what it appears to mean.
Well, I certainly find the QPL's "you must patch, and you must let me
incorporate your patches; I can apply *your* patches to *my* software but
you can't" extremely offensive; denying me permissions, and requiring
that I grant those same permissions (which I am denied myself) back to
the initial author for my work. (If he won't grant them to me for his
work, how can he possibly demand I grant them to him for my work and then
claim the license is free?)
I think this should be considered non-free; I think this interpretation
of DFSG#3 agrees. I don't presently have any handy one-liners like "freedom
to private modifications" to summarize my disgust at this term, though.
(To be clear, patch clauses are explicitly free, for obvious reasons--though
as I've said I'd like that to change. I think "you must patch, *and* you
must permit me to incorporate your patches" goes beyond the DFSG exception.)
--
Glenn Maynard
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