Lewis Jardine wrote: > 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.
That is essentially what happened. I scanned through the quoted message just enough to see what appeared to be someone prematurely reporting debian-legal's license analysis before it is completely fleshed out, which has happened in the past with other licenses (for example, the news sites that reported debian-legal's "the MPL seems like it might be non-free" as "Debian kicking out Mozilla"). (From later discussion, that was not the case, and someone was just reporting what they had discovered by reading debian/copyright from a package.) Based on that, I suggested that no action was needed on the bug until after the arguments had been fully explored and a finished license analysis was ready. (Which I still need to finish writing, now that QPL argumentation seems to have wrapped up. :) ) In doing so, I unintentionally dismissed your quoted arguments in favor of the QPL. My apologies. > 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. Right. The only argument I saw was the one in the above quoted paragraphs, and I responded to the "make an official statement" by saying that we were currently working on the official statement. - Josh Triplett
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