On Sat, Jan 09, 1999 at 10:11:42PM -0500, Zephaniah E, Hull wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 09, 1999 at 12:03:35PM -0800, Darren Benham wrote:
> (Note that I mean no insult to the author of the new DFSG draft, but I'm
> going to speak my mind on this one)
(If you'd really like to avoid insult, you might like to also avoid phrases
such as "the author apparently does not understand the issues". Just by the
by, and all that.)
> I've been happily ignoring this in the hopes that it would just die and
> /go away/, if nothing of substance is changed then I must ask,
> /WHY/!?!?!?..
I dunno. I'm just going with what everyone else seems to indicate. Ian
proposed the change in the first place, and I assume he knows *something*
about the DFSG. Bruce's comments on the thread included a note something
along the lines of "my preferred changes to the DFSG would only add a few
points, not a whole bunch of stuff like this".
Basically (at least, TTBOMK), there are a few things we'd like to restrict
(like IBM not being able to revoke licenses willy-nilly), that we can't
based on the DFSGv1. Additionally, the DFSGv1 isn't entirely easy to
understand itself: do clauses like "if you base research on SWI-Prolog
and publish this research you must include appropriate acknoledgements
and references to SWI-Prolog" fall under "discrimination against fields
of endeavour", or not? For that matter, does the GPL discriminate against
proprietry programmers?
[...vagueness of first section...]
In short: "You have to be able to use it. You have to be able to give it
to other people. You must be able to change it, and give that to other
people. You can't get your license suddenly revoked." If you've got a
better way of saying that that's both understandable, and covers all
the appropriate possibilites, feel free to do it right. Darren Benham
is having a toy with the wording atm, I believe.
> In fact, this seems to outright forbid the GPL, which puts restrictions
> on what you can do with it
Ummm. Hence the list of "restrictions" you can add, below.
> For added fun the author apparently does not understand the issues
> which are involved, as the QPL is not final, and there has been some
> argument over the question of it being completely DFSG compliant...
There has? There's certainly been argument over it -- its GPL
compatibility has been dubious at best, which doesn't do much for KDE. But
it's always been DFSG-free. [0] And yes, it has (had?) other problems
(notably the patch clause), but, it seems to me to be headed (in large
part thanks to Joseph Carter as far as I've seen) towards something
worth emulating.
I might add, btw, that I didn't, and don't, believe that my post is
particularly ready to be made as a proposal, and voted on. Certainly,
if this goes through before the QPL is finished and Qt 2 is released,
the QPL ought not be listed as an example license [1]. And I'm in
complete agreement with Manoj on some of the wording [2] -- it sucks. It
_needs_ rework, /especially/ the introduction (of which there basically
isn't one).
Yeesh.
Cheers,
aj
[0] In particular, if you look through
http://www.troll.no/announce/qpl.html
you'll find a quote from Eric Raymond that it's Open Source, and if
you peruse,
http://slashdot.org/articles/98/11/22/1029225.shtml
you'll find a message from Richard Stallman that it's free software.
Now, sure, they could have both been wrong. But I'm willing to be
content to make the same mistakes as esr and rms.
[1] Like, duh.
[2] I say "some", because I'm sure there's at least one sentence in there
that doesn't *need* changes. I haven't verified this however. The
introduction, the termination clause and the "application" note
particularly bother me, fwiw.
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.
``Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking
for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.''
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