On Fri, Nov 19, 2004 at 12:37:55PM +1300, Blair Strang wrote: > Manoj Srivastava wrote: > >>>Say what? It sure as hell ain't hardware. And, between software, > >>>hardware, and wetware, stuff shipped in Debian is software. > > It took me a while to see what you mean, and I think I do now. > > Silly question: since Debian ships them, are licenses themselves to > be considered software? Obscure corner case. The considered opinion of -legal is that we should ignore the actual license texts for software included in Debian, since those are immutable according to copyright law anyway (therefore it would be entirely futile to require these to be free: they cannot be), and that we have no business packaging random arbitrary licenses for software that is not included in Debian, therefore the issue does not arise. Somebody who was creating a collection of licenses (I can't think why) might need to worry about this. Most licenses don't even give you permission to distribute them, so you're pretty screwed in that scenario. Copyright really sucks at times. Much like the license of hardware is not an issue, because we don't ship that either. [All this is working under the assumption that license texts are copyrightable at all, which is by no means clear and probably varies with jurisdiction. In regions where they are not, obviously there is no problem]. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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