On Tue, Jul 13, 2004 at 12:57:33AM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: > Right, that's basically my point. There's plenty of grey fuzziness here, > and the QPL falls within it. debian-legal have produced some tests in an > attempt to clarify which bits of the grey fuzziness are free or not, but > they're effectively arbitrary - they haven't been well discussed within > the project as a whole. If we're going to make decisions about the grey > fuzziness, we need to do it in a way that includes a much wider range of > the developer body. Until that's done, there's no intrinsic reason for > debian-legal's idea about the location of the line to be better than > anyone else's opinion.
This argument could be used for a huge number of licenses that go through this list, claiming that every decision more "fuzzy" than "this program may not be used commercially" should be discussed on debian-devel or some other inappropriate mailing list (or, even more unreasonably, put to a vote to adjust the project's founding documents) before being valid. I just don't find "silent majority" arguments interesting. This isn't a private mailing list; if you disagree, argue your position, instead of arguing that the conclusions of the list are meaningless. > With the possible exception of the dissident test, I don't think any of > these are obviously freedom issues. I'm also not sure I buy the > dissident test - the GPL allows for a hostile government to declare that > it holds a patent on some section of the subversive code and prevent it > from being distributed any further. This is potentially worse for the > dissident movement as a whole, even if it's better for the individual > dissident who wrote the code. They can't comply with the GPL unless they > fight the lawsuit, and, uh, well. Oops. A hostile government can also declare that the subversive code can not be distributed because it says so; that's not the point of that test. Please see http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html, 9 A(a). -- Glenn Maynard
