Cervisia license issues

[Ben Burton]

Hi.

Currently cervisia is licensed under the QPL.  As the maintainer of
kdesdk in debian, I am unfortunately faced with having to remove
cervisia from the debian distribution since the QPL does not meet with
debian's free software guidelies.  Of course this is debian's decision,
but nevertheless it seems worth bringing up the two specific issues that
concern us:

  Choice of Law:

  The "Choice of Law" section states that disputes will be settled by
  Oslo City Court.  This is problematic since it requires recipients of
  the software to travel to Oslo if a dispute should arise.

  6c:

  Clause 6c requires that the recipient provide any modifications or
  linked applications to the original software developer upon request.
  This is problematic for a number of reasons, including requiring
  recipients to identify themselves and to keep archives of their own
  software for an indefinite amount of time in case the cervisia authors
  should make such a request.

For a somewhat better summary of the issues that make these two clauses
problematic, see the draft overview at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg00157.html
and the subsequent thread.

Given these issues, is it possible to consider altering the licensing
for cervisia in any way?  Possibilities are as follows:

1. Make exceptions that deal with these two clauses.  This was done by
the ocaml developers for similar reasons.  Their changes were as
follows:

- Replace "choice of law" with "choice of venue".  Specifically, they
  replaced that clause with "This license is governed by the Laws of
  France", without requiring any specific venue for resolving disputes.

- Add the following exception:

  "As a special exception to the Q Public Licence, you may develop
  application programs, reusable components and other software items
  that link with the original or modified versions of the Compiler and
  are not made available to the general public, without any of the
  additional requirements listed in clause 6c of the Q Public licence."

2. Alternatively it might be worth considering a dual license for cervisia,
similar to what Trolltech has done with Qt.


I'm CCing this message to 296514 at bugs.debian.org, which is the bug that
was filed requesting the removal of cervisia from debian.  If this CC
could be preserved it would be appreciated.  I have also CCed the three
primary authors for cervisia; apologies if you get this twice.

Thanks,

Ben.