Sven Luther <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Sun, Jul 25, 2004 at 02:38:18PM -0400, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote: >> Sven Luther <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> >> > On Sun, Jul 25, 2004 at 12:22:04PM -0400, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote: >> >> The law already makes it illegal to tamper with copyright notices; a >> >> license doesn't need to say that in order to make it wrong to do so. >> >> Perhaps it could just be left out? >> > >> > Given that lawyer wrote this licence, why did they add it. And in any case, >> > what harm is there to do so ? >> >> I don't know why they added it. Maybe you could ask them. The usual >> reason is to make such a change not merely a crime, but also copyright >> infringement, so as to extract punitive damages as well. >> >> But as a side effect, it also makes a bunch of good things violate the >> license -- like translating "Copyright (c) 2004 Bob Smith" to whatever >> language is appropriate. > > Notice this other wording for basically the same thing : > > 1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's > source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you > conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate > copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the > notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; > and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License > along with the Program.
That's very different; that allows me to write a new and different copyright notice, so long as it's complete and accurate, and also appropriate. > It may be not exactly the same wording, but the intent is clearly the same. I > know that ocaml upstream chose the QPL in part because it was less verbose and > easier to understand that other licences out there. Sure, you may loose some > details in this simplicity, but the intent is clear. And yet we don't argue much about the GPL, MIT/X11, or other Free licenses, and there has been well over a week and hundreds of messages on the QPL. If the idea is that it's easier to understand, they really screwed up. > Also, consider the annotation : > > This doesn't really need to be stated, since to do so would be fraudulent. > > Do we really need to continue arguing about this close ? Yes -- the annotation is incorrect. This is much more restrictive than the law requires. There are many honest activities which break this clause. -- Brian Sniffen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
