Re: RES: What makes software copyrightable anyway?
On 5/19/05, Adam McKenna <adam@flounder.net> wrote:
> On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 07:38:18PM -0400, Raul Miller wrote:
> > Which can occur if anyone redistributes any of the I_WANT_OPENSSL
> > debian packages.
>
> According to you. If, for the sake of argument, we assume that such
> binaries are undistributable, Debian is still not affected, since we
> aren't contributing to their distribution, only their creation.
In some senses you're right.
The README.Debian clearly documents how to use this in conjunction
with apt-get -b source -- and this probably does count as contributing
towards their creation.
But is the distinction between contributing to their creation and
contributing towards their distribution a strong distinction? After
all, we've provided a number of other rather strong contributions
towards distribution in general -- it might be hard to argue that
those contributions are irrelevant here.
On the other hand, if the copyright holder supplied the
I_WANT_OPENSSL option, then that copyright holder probably
can't hold us in violation of the license. Only if code has been
incorporated from other projects would this seem to be a serious
problem. Basically, I think that the violation has to be downstream
from someone who has significant copyright for it to be a serious
issue.
Thanks,
--
Raul
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