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List:       kde-licensing
Subject:    Re: New QPL online
From:       Warwick Allison <warwick () troll ! no>
Date:       1999-03-09 12:25:03
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On Tue, 09 Mar 1999, Richard Stallman wrote:
>> This is similar in spirit to a requirement in the GPL, but it sets a
>    > stricter limit on the fee, and thus takes away some of the permission
>    > that the GPL gives.
>
>    $ 20 for the binery only CD.
>    $ 55,923,489.  For the Source code.
>
>The GPL does prohibit this.  It has a basically similar clause.

The same, except the GPL clause can be abused - if the disk copying department
of my well corporatized free software distribution company charges the shipping
department $55M per disk, then the "a charge no more than your cost of
physically performing source distribution" is quite high.  Not to mention my
new disk copying operation on the moon.

>The problem with 6a in the QPL is that it is more strict in its
>details than the GPL, on this issue.

Only on a case-by-case basis, and not for any real-word software I'm aware of,
because of the way software distribution has changed since the GPL was written
(CD-ROMs and faster networks)  As I said, it's POSSIBLE to be incompatible on
this issue, but it doesn't occur in the real world.  Since this is not a court,
the real world actually matters (and none of us want to see the GPL end up in a
court!)

If the source for something is available in the way source is distributed these
days (eg. in a 0.01% space of CD #5 in a $10 all-inclusive distribution), then
there is no incompatiblity between the GPL and the QPL for that item.

Today, raw distribution is ridiculously cheap, to the point where all that
actually costs is the work of packaging (and the cost of that is increasing
with wages), and that is DECREASING the amount of ad-hoc binary distribution,
and making it a viable commercial activity for companies like SuSE, Caldera, and
RedHat, much to the delight of developers - who usually hate dealing with
binaries.

--
Warwick

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