Re: Sun Java available from non-free
On Sun, 21 May 2006, Francesco Poli wrote:
> > Anyway, the background is that James Troup, Jeroen van Wolffelaar and
> > myself examined the license before accepting it into non-free (which
> > is three times the usual examination,
>
> It may be three times the usual examination, but when the license is not
> *clearly* suitable for the archive under consideration (non-free, in
> this case), the general recommendation is to check with debian-legal,
> AFAICT.
> Do you three think that the DLJ is trivially suitable for the non-free
> archive?
There's something that you must keep in mind. Ftpmasters are responsible
to decide if the license is OK for us or not. debian-legal is nothing more
than an "advisory board" for them. They can examine a license and share
remarks to ftpmasters but they certainly can't decide if the ftpmasters
have to accept the package or not.
In that case, ftpmasters accepted it, end of discussion. You HAVE to
accept decisions of delegates within Debian, that's how we can effectively
work.
If you really fear legal problems, then you should work with Sun to see if
you can reword the license so that it better matches the FAQ which gives us
currently all the warranties that we need. We can terminate the license as
soon as Sun starts bothering us with non-FAQ-conforming interpretations of
their license.
> Why weren't you able to examine the license in public?
Because the license change was not yet public and that we *cooperate* with
Sun (because we want them to free the product even more in the future).
Furthermore, doing a bit of Debian PR by having a timely announce of the
new java license, is good for us too.
> > extensive contact with Sun to ensure that the tricky clauses were
> > actually okay.
>
> Unfortunately that didn't mean the tricky clauses were fixed or made
> harmless in any (legally binding) way.
You are not responsible to make that decision in Debian, ftpmasters are.
Criticizing ftpmasters won't help them changing their minds.
> As has already been pointed out: what if Sun Java manages to enter a
> future stable (or oldstable) release?
> How quickly can Debian "effectively" drop a package from there?
Just like usual.
> It would be bad PR if Debian will have to remove Sun Java from the
> archive, shortly after public announcements that it accepted it in.
No it wouldn't.
> I really hope we can solve the issues in a graceful manner.
You're not interested in that. "graceful manner" means you want ftpmasters
to agree with you. They won't. And I don't.
Thanks to everyone who worked (even privately) on this issue!
> Even better, I hope that Sun Java can become DFSG-free as quickly as
> possible,
You're not facilitating it. People who managed that java upload did
discuss with Sun and they probably know that this was the right first
step. You have no idea of the internal lobbying that may be going on and
you can't judge how to best achieve DFSG-freeness of java.
Cheers,
PS: Yeah I'm a bit pissed of that we only have people criticizing when we
do great things.
--
Raphaël Hertzog
Premier livre français sur Debian GNU/Linux :
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