Re: license for eSvn
Scripsit Pierre Chifflier <chifflier@cpe.fr>
> On Mon, Sep 06, 2004 at 08:05:24PM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote:
> > > and that this kind of license is already used by other debian
> > > packages
> > Which packages? If that is true, bugs should be filed and packages
> > moved to non-free, preferrably before sarge releases if at all
> > possible.
> lincvs. Which has been accepted a long time ago into main.
Hm, the copyyright file for lincvs appears to be wrong. It says:
| This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
| it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
| the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
| any later version.
with no platform restrictions.
However, the file LICENCE in the source tarball contains:
| LinCVS is available under two different licenses:
|
| If LinCVS is linked against the GPLed version of Qt
| LinCVS is released under the terms of GPL also.
|
| If LinCVS is linked against a nonGPLed version of Qt
| LinCVS is released under the terms of the
| LinCVS License for non-Unix platforms (LLNU)
and the same notice appears in the actual C++ source file I sampled.
This is non-free because it only gives a license for as long as one
links with Qt; if I rewrite the code to work with another toolkit
(even a public-domain one) I find myself with no license for the code
at all. The freedom of the GPL does not survive that kind of
crippling; so the software has no free license. The lincvs author
should be contacted for a license clarification, or, alternatively,
the package should be moved to non-free.
What both authors probably *intend* is to offer a dual license which
lets the user choose arbitrarily between the GPL and another license.
That would automatically imply that the usual *internal* restrictions
prevent the user from linking with a GPL-incompatible library if he
chooses the GPL, and from linking with GPL code if he choses the other
license. The author can of course point this out as guidance for the
user - but he cannot, without losing DFSG-freedom, deny the user the
right to choose the free license even in situations where the author
expects the free license to be useless.
--
Henning Makholm "Punctuation, is? fun!"
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