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Re: Proposal for clarification of DFSG.1



Hi,

On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 17:17, Henning Makholm wrote:
> >   The license of a Debian component may not restrict
> >   any party from selling or giving away the software
> >   as a component of an aggregate software distribution
> >   containing programs from several different sources.
> > + (But may prohibit selling the software itself alone.)
> >   The license may not require a royalty or other fee
> >   for such sale.
> 
> This is, to the best of my awareness, the debian-legal consensus
> interpretation.

This would actually mean that we can continue to distribute LaTeX2HTML.
:-) (I still volunteer to adopt it in main.)

> The consensus, however, goes on to point out that an "aggregate
> software distribution" may consist of the program in question plus a
> Bourne shell implementation of "Hello, world", and the license *must*
> allow such an aggregate to be sold for profit.
> 
> In short, we accept "you may not sell this program alone" clauses, but
> only if they have loopholes big enough to make them completely
> ineffective in practice.

The upstream maintainer of the package in question suggested this by
arguing that one can always charge for an aggregation (be it small as
suggested above).

I would really like to have a consensus about this issue until the sarge
release for being sure about this when checking licenses.

So DDs, please put a statement to this thread. I actually propose the
adjustment of the DFSG. Therefore I need at least 5 sponsors for either
(or each) of my formerly stated versions (A) and/or (B) (following the
Debian Constitution: Standard Resolution Procedure).

Remember that (B) seems to violate DFSG.8!

Thanks in advance.

bye,
  Roland

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