Re: Is NPL DFSG complient or not?
Andreas Jellinghaus wrote:
> debian should list it as DFSG free licence. That function of that
> list is "if you ahve a program under this licence, than it's free
> software".
I'm not quite sure about that. We don't consider software free if it
says "Use, modify, and redistribute all you want, but send me a postcard
every time you do so".
The requirement for a postcard may seem small, but it is simply too
onerous if the software gets serious use, and it would be very bad
is a large number of packages adopted such a requirement.
The NPL's requirement for keeping old, broken versions around for
months after they have been superseded may also be too onerous for it
to qualify as "free".
> whether you want to recommend other people to use NPL is a different topic.
> and debian does not deal with that topic (bsd<->gpl<->artistic is so bad,
> that a npl doesnt make it worse).
In this case, we have a good reason for dealing with that topic: the
NPL will require us to allocate disk space and mirror space for
versions that we don't want to keep, and will require us to make
exceptions to our archive management process to deal with the NPL'd
packages.
(If we decide to follow it, that is. We already break the GPL's
source distribution requirements for similar reasons, by keeping
only the newest source even if we still distribute older binaries
for some architectures.)
Richard Braakman
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