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List:       kde-licensing
Subject:    Re: [knghtbrd@debian.org: QPL v0.92+knghtbrd1]
From:       Andreas Pour <pour () mieterra ! com>
Date:       1998-12-29 7:21:59
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Joseph Carter wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 28, 1998 at 11:03:22PM +0000, Andreas Pour wrote:
> > I have briefly looked at the latest draft, and that totally convinces me
> > that Troll Tech needs a copyright lawyer to draft its license.  Especially
> > Section 7 is bizarre and impossible as drafted.  Anyway, I attach some
> > comments in a file (b/c it's in html) which hopefully provides lots of
> > clarifications, as the document is pretty darn ambiguous as drafted.
> > Deletions from the draft are underlined, additions are emboldened.
>
> A Copyright lawyer would be nice.  We don't exactly have one offering to
> do it free of charge however and I don't think I have done all that bad a
> job considering that I'm not a Copyright lawyer.

Please don't take this as a criticism drafted at you.  Just like a copyright
lawyer with no computer training should not be hacking the 2.2 kernel
unsupervised by a programmer and then publicly distribute the kernel, so a
programmer should not draft a legal document.  It's a question of
qualifications.  Though people like to bash lawyers, there is in fact a purpose
to the three years of legal training and seven years of apprenticeship that go
into being a good lawyer.

> The only person
> involved with this discussion who is even in a position to really consult
> a Copyright lawyer is RMS, and you removed him from your reply so unless
> someone forwards the message to him, he'll never see it.

Obviously any lawyer working for RMS would have a conflict and could not render
legal advice to TT.  The point was not addressed at you but at TT, I keep
saying this so hopefully they will take this advice and hire a lawyer, maybe
they have already, I don't know.

> (Not to mention
> my belief that RMS is likely not going to be viewed by anyone at Troll
> Tech as taking their professional product and profitability into account,
> whether he did or not)
>
> As you commented, a good portion of section 7 has no legal purpose.  The
> purpose was not intended to be legal, it was intended to be there for
> people who AREN'T lawyers to read and understand the intent of the line
> above, which could serve a rewrite based on your comments.  Your solution
> of just delete the whole thing doesn't much help things.

Well, it prevents language from being in there that (a) doesn't work, (b)
doesn't make sense (either from the QPL's or the GPL's perspective), (c) is
incomprehensible, and ergo (c) won't be enforceable.  Face it, you will never
satisfy the GPL zealots unless TT GPLs or LGPLs Qt, which IMHO would be a
terrible thing (for many reasons I won't get in to) and in any event I think
their creative minds would still find something wrong with Qt.  My view is you
cannot satisfy the radical factions so don't bother, they will not be
reasonable so you can't reason with them, they have to have things exactly
their extreme way or not at all.  Believe me, I tried to be reasonable on this
mailing list and as is the mark of true zealots even when backed into a corner
they will never admit they are wrong.

In short:  the only way to get a reasonble solution is for all parties to be
reasonable and for all parties to want a solution.  TT has done an excellent
job at letting people comment and has been very reasonable and flexible in its
proposals, and also clearly desires a solution.  The other side in this debate
have been nothing but unreasonable, unbending stakes in the cement, unwilling
to make even the smallest departure from their dogma, and since they appear to
want to see KDE die and Gnome succeed they do not want a solution, either.
While I wish it weren't so, that is the way I see it.

Regards,

Andreas Pour
pour@mieterra.com

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