Sven Luther wrote:
On Sun, Jul 25, 2004 at 10:15:23AM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote:
I apologize if I failed to respond to arguments in your initial mail; I
can assure you it was not intentional. Unfortunately, I cannot seem to
find the subthread you are referring to.
My post may have been : Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
And your reply to it was : Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
And said :
debian-legal is currently analyzing the QPL, and working on a license
summary. See http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg00157.html
for the DRAFT summary, and feel free to offer your comments,
suggestions, or statements of whether the draft represents your
position. The consensus seems to be that the license is non-free, and
the only thing left is to work out the full details of the summary. I
am currently writing the second draft, based on the responses to the first.
It would certainly be reasonable to wait until the summary is completed
before acting on this bug.
Also, to the best of my knowledge, programs under only the QPL are rare
in Debian.
(Incidentally, a quick grep through /usr/share/doc/*/copyright on my
system to check that statement turned up mdetect, which appears to be
mixing QPLed and GPLed code in the same program.)
So, you clearly dismisses my arguments, even if those where weak since it was
in early participation to this, and may have missed some argumentation, and
was already passably irritated with Brian over this.
In particular the " The consensus seems to be that the license is non-free,
and the only thing left is to work out the full details of the summary.",
Seemed a bit harsh and premature to me, given that you ignored my objections.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
If you read the original post (
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg00424.html ) carefully,
you'll find that the real arguments are hidden in the quoted message
appended to the post. Quite easily missable, in my opinion.
The only argument in the first two paragraphs (
I don't know why, but Brian has been bothering me about claiming the
QPL is non-free. I agree with the emacs thing, and am working on a
solution to it when time permits, and upstream has also agreed to it
in principle, so this should be solved before the now imminent
(whatever this means for debian release cycle :) sarge release.
Anyway, it would rightly surprise me if the QPL would be reveled
non-free after all this years of use and the KDE controversy it was
linked to, and i believe that we have more than just ocaml as QPLed
programs in debian. So i request the help of debian-legal to help me
clarify this thing, and either make an official statement that the QPL
is non-free, or shut Brian up, and let me back to work on my packages.
) is that the QPL must be free, as it has been considered by many to be
free for ages. This is, I believe, the fallacy of "Appeal to Common
Practice".
There are other, non-fallacious arguments in the body of the quoted
message, but I suspect many people didn't realise they were there.
Also, "shut Brian up, and let me back to work on my packages." is, in my
opinion, a rather hostile phrase to use when opening a conversation.
--
Lewis Jardine
IANAL IANADD
