Sven Luther wrote: > On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 09:19:40AM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote: > >>On Tue, Jul 20, 2004 at 12:50:15AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote: >> >>>On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 06:01:50PM -0400, Glenn Maynard wrote: >>> >>>>On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 11:27:05PM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >>>> >>>>>Thanks, but in all this thread, i have not seen a single reasonable >>>>>suggestion, so i have some doubts about this. >>>> >>>>Yes, you have: dual-license under the GPL. It's a completely reasonable, >>> >>>Thanks all the same. It is unreasonable, since it is totally opposite to what >>>upstream is trying to achieve. >> >>According to my best interpretation of msgid:[EMAIL PROTECTED], >>OCaml upstream wants to either: >> >>1) be able to take other people's modifications proprietary. That's fine >>for them, it's just non-free for us. > > Oh, ok. do we have a consensus on that ? could you point out why in clear > points of the DFSG, and not some far fetched and controversed island paradise > metahpors. Notice that the FSF doesn't seem toi think so, and it would make > the BSD non-free, would it not ?
As far as I can tell, there is no consensus on whether "upstream gets an all-permissive license" is non-free. I personally consider it acceptable but obnoxious. The primary problem is with "you must send upstream your changes on request", which only gets worse in combination with "upstream gets an all-permissive license". >>OR >> >>2) Wants to be able to relicence OCaml to others under a proprietary licence >>for a fee, in order to fund further development. That's even finer, and can >>be done by either writing it all themselves (and hence having nobody else's >>licence to worry about), or getting copyright assignments or >>totally-permissive grants from everyone whose contributions they incorporate >>into OCaml. >>1) is non-free, no matter what licence they use. 2) doesn't require the QPL >>(which I feel is non-free for a variety of reasons). > > Ah, and the FSF strongly encouraging me to give them copyright of any > contribution to an FSF project is not ? "Strongly encouraging" is not "forcing". If the FSF required you to assign copyright on your changes in order to distribute the software, that would be non-free. >>I understand you know upstream and their foibles, and that's great -- it's > > Yeah, and years of licence discussion and haggling with them to obtain what we > have. Now, if i come forward and tell them the QPL is non-free, i imagine them > already thinking "what do they want now, 3 years ago, both them and the FSF > said the QPL was ok ? Why should i ever believe them again on a subjet like > this" especially if the only suggestion is "use the GPL". Please read http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg01001.html before believing that the QPL was previously considered Free. >>want to follow. But Debian has one as well, and when the two conflict, > > Sure, but please hold it post sarge release, or go fight binary kernel module > writers, which are in much worse violation of the licences, and even a threat > to the future of free software. Debian has an obligation to its users to handle all licensing issues, not just the most important or most severe. >>there will be discussion. You can help upstream by summarising the result >>of this discussion for them. From what I can see, one of the major > > Yeah, but when i started to discuss real issues, like the question of fee for > data transfer in clause 6c, or the dureation of the requirement, nobody > discussed it, so ... > >>that the licence that the OCaml people have carefully chosen is violently >>disliked by several people on d-legal. Unfortunately, life is full of bad >>news. > > But was fine three years ago when they chose it, and this had some influence > about their chosing of it. What thrust will they have in our decisions if we > don't stand by it, especially as i am sure most people participating in this > have not read previous threads about this issue ? Again, see above; the QPL was not necessarily considered Free at the time either. - Josh Triplett
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