On Tue, Aug 03, 2004 at 09:24:23PM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote: > On Tue, Aug 03, 2004 at 09:05:56AM +0200, Sven Luther wrote: > > On Mon, Aug 02, 2004 at 11:38:58PM +0200, Francesco Poli wrote: > > > But I'm not allowed to, because the QPL forces me to grant additional > > > permissions to the initial developer. > > > > But by integrating the patch, he gives you the same kind of rights, so ... > > So there is now an ever-widening set of people who can create proprietary > works. Cool. You've also effectively argued that the patch clause in the > QPL is totally non-effectual as soon as I get upstream to include a patch of > mine, because I have an all-permissive grant to the changes to my patch > (which you appear to indicate is the entireity of the original software, > once my change has been integrated) thus I can distribute however I like, > with whatever other patches I like. > > Methinks you might not want to be pushing that argument.
Why not, if this is indeed a correct interpretation, it may be a real good argument to bring upstream to change the licencing. > As to the loophole: 3b says "When modifications to the Software *are > released under this license*, a non-exclusive royalty-free right is granted > to the initial developer" (emphasis mine). So if the changes are released > under a different licence, upstream is screwed -- especially if it's a > QPL-incompatible licence (such as the GPL). The only circumstance I can > find where a change must be released under the QPL is when binary > distribution takes place. If I only distribute my patch, upstream has no > special right to my code. Sure, but only the QPL allows for binary distribution as in QPL 4, so ... > Considering that you have said that upstream really, really wants to be able > to sell my changes, I think this clause might want to be reviewed to see if Well, they really don't want to maintain more than one source code tree. > it really does what upstream wants it to do, because as it stands, unless I > distribute my changes in binary form or explicitly under the QPL, OCaml has > no right to it. Sure, that is what the QPL says. > Again, a straight permission grant or copyright assignment would cause this > problem to go away, because unless I'm doing binary distribution, OCaml > needs it before it can sell my changes even with OCaml under the QPL as it > currenly is. And licence incompatibility is going to totally screw with > cherry-picking changes as it stands. Sure, but that would be the upstream author's responsability to handle it. Friendly, Sven Luther