Walter Landry a écrit :
The X11 indemnification applies to Recipient's use, modification, reproduction and distribution so I do not see the difference.However, the intent is rather different, I believe (I'm not trying to push the licence forward, just to clarify things): This model is used to price CDS, which are, well, financial products that have burnt and will probably still burn many financial institutions. So they have a legitimate point in saying "if you fool around with our model, and distribute it to a client of yours, well do not hold us accountable".No, that is not quite what it is saying. That would be more like a NO WARRANTY clause.
I get your point. Fully. "do not hold us accountable" was also a poor choice of words.
Nonetheles, it seems to me that this applies only to Derivative Works, not to the original software itself. So it could possibly be OK to distribute within Debian only the original, while letting the recipients free to use, modify, redistribute derived works at will.If Debian can not distribute modified versions of the software, I could hardly call if DFSG-free.
Sure. I suppose that "free to distribute modified versions at your own risk" is not acceptable.
More seriously, while this is not covered explicitely by the licence, it seems to me that the *intent* covers modifications of the pricing algorithm. Not packaging or compilation tweaking.
But then, it still does make perfect sense to consider "free [...] at your own risk" as not acceptable.
I'm not trying to push this licence forward, as I mentionned earlier. Just wondering if it may be not too stupid to package it myself, in the hope of potentially seeing it in Debian one day, "practical" issues set aside.It depends on your point of view. Some of the things you callpractical I would call ideological.
I guess it also depends where you stand in the food chain. Whether you're authoring, distributing or consuming such software.
By ideological, I mean that, well, you know, the QPL is considered free...Now that I know that it's unrealistic to package it for Debian, I'm pondering packaging it myself. The indemnification clause is a major no-go.
I also wanted to have advice on this licence because I was surprised to see a licence on a financial software distributed by a financial company, that did seem to be free software. Borderline, perhaps, but nonetheless.There are many ways that this license could fail. For a more definite answer you would have to ask the ftp-masters directly.
Thanks.
Cheers, Walter Landry wlandry@caltech.edu
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Guillaume Yziquel
http://yziquel.homelinux.org/