Abram Hindle's Blog
   


About
Abram Hindle's Blog, The Personal Blog Of Abram Hindle

Abram Hindle
abezblog@abez.ca

Subscribe
Subscribe to a syndicated feed of my weblog, brought to you by the wonders of RSS.

Flavours
There's more than one way to view this weblog; try these flavours on for size.

  • index
  • circa 1993
  • RSS

    • Links
    These are a few of my favourite links.

    		       
    Thu, 12 Mar 2009

    Qi II is NOT Open Source at all, M. Tarver is abusing the term open source with
    his own homegrown definition. Qi II is proprietary software it does meet the definition of opensource put forth by OSI, Debian or free software by by the FSF.

    It really bothers me that educated people would take part in the dilution of semantic meaning of something so legalistic as licenses.

    To: dr mtarver ukonline co uk

    From: abram hindle

    Subject: Qi II License

    Your license for Qi II is really confusing, it says "not for the production of commercial software", commercial software is not defined, then later it says "remain available as open source". If you read http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd , which is considered to be the standard for the definition of open source (since you did not define it) Clause 1 states:

    1. Free Redistribution

    The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

    Clause 1 means that I can package any such open source software, put it on a CD, sell the CD, charge money for any services related the product etc. Even in a commercial setting. This is required of opensource, it shouldn't matter how its used as long as the license and property is respected (which can require that all future derivatives remain under the same license).

    So your license tries to be open-source but contains clauses which violate the spirit open source. MySQL gets around this by dual licensing and requiring copyright assignment in the case of accepting patches.

    Can you address these issues?

    • Your license claims to be opensource but can't be if it limits
    commercial exploitation
    • Alternatively you allow commercial exploitation, enabling it to be
    opensource, but it is not very clear.

    If it was dual licensed with the GPL and whatever license you want then at least I'd know it was opensource, but as it stands Debian can't include your software with their distribution and it certainly doesn't sound like it is open source.

    abram

    License found at: http://www.lambdassociates.org/whatsnew.htm

    This software is licensed only for personal and educational use and not for the production of commercial software. Modifications to this program are allowed but the resulting source must be annotated to indicate the nature of and the author of these changes. Any modified source is bound by this licence and must remain available as open source under the same conditions it was supplied and with this licence at the top.

    This software is supplied AS IS without any warranty. In no way shall ; Mark Tarver or Lambda Associates be held liable for any damages resulting from the use of this program. The terms of these conditions remain binding unless the individual holds a valid license to use Qi commercially. This license is found in the final page of 'Functional Programming in Qi'. In that event the terms of that license apply to the license holder.

    And Dr. M Tarver responds:

    From: Mark Tarver

    To: Abram Hindle

    Subject: Re: Qi II License

    I don't adhere to the open source definition of Debian which is not trademarked nor binding. The source you quote to a retrospetive attempt to bind the term. For me, it means that the source code can be viewed and changed. Commercial = for money or anything of monetary value.

    [] permanent link