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Re: DRAFT: debian-legal summary of the QPL



MJ Ray wrote:
> On 2004-07-13 21:39:31 +0100 Francesco Poli <frx@firenze.linux.it> wrote:
> 
>> I agree. Focussing on packages only would require too many analyses,
>> indeed.
> 
> Are you claiming that "this package fails to follow for the same reasons
> as that one" requires more analyses than analysing the licence and then
> "this package fails to follow because it is only under licence L"? I
> remind you, we still should check the packages if asked. In fact, I
> think if there are n packages under some combination of that licence, we
> do at most n analyses if we mainly analyse packages and n+1 if we
> analyse the licence first. Marginal, but possibly still significant, for
> some.

Don't forget that once the license summary is done, the package
summaries will generally be trivial, so saying "n" and "n+1" is
inaccurate.  If you are going to ignore constant factors, then you might
as well say that both approaches will require O(n) summaries. :)

If you use the summary of the first package with a given license as the
summary for that license, then you may end up working around additional
baggage in the summary that was specific to that package.  If you start
from a license summary, you just need to ask "how does this differ from
the general case", not "how does this differ from <insert possibly
obscure package here>'s case".

>> [...] would be a waste of time if we had to review the
>> same licenses again and again or to dig in the archives to recall if
>> some old package in a similar situation was judged free or not...
> 
> This is where we are at the moment. I thought the summaries were an
> attempt to reduce the digging, but they seem to have drifted.

How so?

- Josh Triplett

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