Re: ckermit: license advice
On Sun, Jan 18, 2004 at 03:40:28PM +0000, Henning Makholm wrote:
> Scripsit Ian Beckwith <ianb@nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
>
> > I know what they are gettting at, the wording is so big commercial
> > unix vendors have to pay. Is there a way to say this while remaining
> > DFSG-free?
>
> No. (If there was, it would be a bug in the wording of the DFSG, and
> such bugs are fixed informally and unceremonially by Debian deciding
> not to distribute the software in main or contrib anyway).
That settles it then.
> The closest one gets is probably the GPL, which would prevent a
> commercial vendor from providing linked binaries in the same product
> as their proprietary libc. However, nothing would prevent the same
> vendor from providing convenience builds as a separate add-on to
> their OS.
I passed this on to upstream, and as I suspected they aren't going for it.
So, unless/until they change their business model, ckermit stays in
non-free.
Thanks for the advice,
Ian.
--
Ian Beckwith - ianb@nessie.mcc.ac.uk - http://nessie.mcc.ac.uk/~ianb/
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