Re: QPL non-DFSG compliance? What future for OCaml in Debian?
On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 01:44:39PM +0200, Jérôme Marant wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm back from vacation and I've just read the debian-legal archive
> where there seem to be a concensus about QPL being not DFSG-compliant.
I didn't see any such consensus, and nobody replied to my objections.
> Sven, could you summarize please? What about those emacs files?
> What about upstream?
There seems to be two critics :
1) point 6c of the QPL fails the chinese dissident or desert island tests.
Apart from the the dubious justification of those tests (i would much have
prefered particular DFSG points), i believe that the licence sets implicitly
the cost of data transfer to the person requiring the sources. This is
mentioned in the other points where source transfer is mentioned, but not
here, so there is a grey area. If the 6c were explicitly mentioning this,
any objection should fall by itself. Maybe the ocaml team may add such a
clarification ?
2) the court of venue issue. All lwasuits must be filled at Versailles.
Well, i am no lawyer, but i hardly find this non-free, and the proponent of
making this non-free are heavily user biased, even if the removal of this
point would make it impossible for the upstream author to sue licence
breakers in far away countries, or even just in the US with the joke of a
legal system they have there. Also, i get the impression that a french court
may be much less inclined to allow bullshit claims than an US court, so this
is not really a problem. I have the feeling that any licence which means you
have to sue in the US would be even less free than that, since it means only
people with enough money to pay the lawsuit gets to have their licence
enforced, but this is only my own opinion.
That said, i made those objections, and nobody cared to CC me their reply, if
they did reply. i am not subscribed to debian-legal, so this makes it
difficult for me to follow those huge mailing lists, without they taking the
elemental courtesy of CCing me as i asked.
So, if there is consensus there, i seriously doubt the legitimacy of their
conclusion, and am wondering about the whole debian-legal process anyway, what
is their real power, and if they can, in case as these, reach real
conclusions, and not just achieve the goal fixed by the participants with more
time to loose.
CCing debian-legal in hope i get a reply this time, and bringing the
conversation here too. Debian-legal folk, please don't drop the me and/or
debian-ocaml from this list.
And to whoever who claimed it was not possible to get a list of QPLed packages
in debian, i invite you to read the grep manpage, and to run it on
/usr/share/doc/<package>/copyright.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
>
> TIA.
>
> --
> Jérôme Marant
>
>
> --
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