On Mon, Aug 23, 2004 at 11:27:01PM +0200, Francesco Poli wrote: > > He doesn't have that permission himself. How can he possibly give it > > to others? If he can't release just under the GPL, how can he allow > > me to? > > Well, it says "any other license(s)", not "any other license(s) with the > additional clause that further recipients must keep further derivative > works available under the QPL also".
If the latter isn't implied, then the clause is extremely misleading: it makes it sound, to contributors, that the software their patches are applied to will always remain available under the terms of the QPL, and your interpretation says this isn't true. > Anyway, the initial developer got the power to relicense a patch when > applied to future versions of the software in exchange of the promise to > keep this future versions available under the QPL also. Further > recipients of the differently licensed versions don't get any special > relicensing power: why should they have additional restrictions beyond > what their license says? > Because the different license says so, you claim. > But then how can it be "any other license" if it must absolutely include > one specified clause? You need to read the clause as a whole, not pick out phrases and read them in a vacuum. The entire "provided" becomes meaningless if he can simply redistribute it under "the GPL and the QPL". (He could then have that person add some other GPL code to the work and send the whole back to him only under the GPL.) Anyway, we aren't going anywhere. I don't think this has any real impact on my opinion of the QPL, anyway, though it may to others. It's clear this is a badly written clause, at least. -- Glenn Maynard
