Anthony Towns' excellent criticisms have provoked me to think of another reason that the Chinese Dissident test captures something important about free software, and thus why the QPL's forced publication or the Affero bit are onerous.
Free software should create a sort of economy in which things are the way they would be if there were no copyrights at all. That's the intuition. In other words, when I write free software, I renounce the ability to control the behavior of the recipient as a condition of their making copies or modifying the software. The most obvious renunciation is that I don't get to demand money for copies. But I also don't get to demand that the person not be a racist; I don't get to demand that the person contribute to the Red Cross; I don't get to demand that the recipient contribute to free software. I renounce that little bit of control over the other person which the copyright law gives me, and in that way, I enhance their freedom. I enhance it to what it would be without the copyright law. You might say that public domain is good enough. But free software is about creating an *economy* of such freedom. So I want to be sure that everyone has the freedoms the would have in a no-copyright regime; and so "viral" licenses like the GPL are good things. Nobody can remove the freeness; that is, if they want to play, then to the extent they play, they must do so within the freedom economy, rather than the control-the-other-guy economy. One thing remains: the requirement of the GPL that source be transmitted. In a no-copyright world, you would not have to give source, so why am I happy with this requirement? Precisely because the important rights are the right to copy *and* the right to modify, and the distribution of the source preserves everyone's right to modify. This is a wrinkle built in to the nature of software. Similarly, we have restrictive formats on text, and I don't object to the relevant provisions of a free documentation license that require distribution in a modifiable form. I'm all for contributing to the community! But I do not want to demand that someone must contribute to the community as the price of copying or modifying free software. That would be to make it non-free. As long as they preserve the *freedoms*, that's the requirement. Publication is not one of them. I'm a weird paradox: I will tell almost anything about myself to just about anyone who asks. I have almost no secrets. At the same time, I am a stalwart advocate for the rights of people to keep all sorts of stuff private, and to be anonymous in the world if they choose (this does not mean, of course, that people who anonymous without good reason should be *trusted*). I find that the forced publication requirements of the QPL and the like make it much harder to be anonymous in the world of free software, and this is what I'm zealously guarding. They are restrictions which do not preserve any important rights of the holder of the software(like the source-provision rules of the GPL), and they do not enhance anybody's freedom. They are therefore onerous license terms. Thomas
