Re: Termination clauses, was: Choice of venue

[Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@debian.org>]

On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 12:40:57AM -0400, David Nusinow wrote:
> Finally, the spirit of the QPL, as from their annotated license[1] appears to
> be very much in favor of Free software. Section 6c's annotation states:
> 
>  "This is to avoid problems with companies that try to hide the source. If we
>  get to know about it we want to be able to get hold of the code even if we are
>  not users. In this way, if somebody tries to cheat and we get to know we can
>  release the code to the public."
> 
> Not only "can" they release the code to the public, but they must release it
> should they choose to use it, according to section 3a. I would argue that while
> this license may fail corner cases of DFSG 5 or 6 (and I'm not sure it does) it
> certaintly does appear that the author's intentions are to remain Free. I have
> heard repeatedly that the developer's intentions are taken in to account when
> evaluating packages, and we seem to have some clear indication here that the
> goal of the QPL is to keep modifications open to the community.

But we're not distributing anything from TrollTech under the QPL, are we? 
If that's the case, TrollTech's annotations aren't worth a hill of beans to
us, because they aren't the licensor.  What TrollTech thinks the licence
means is very important in situtations where it's TrollTech's stuff were
distributing, but in the cases at hand we need to look at what INRIA (OCaml)
and the Cervisia developers (the two QPL-only packages I can recall) think
of the QPL, which is likely to be different.

- Matt