Re: debian-legal review of licenses
On Wed, Feb 11, 2004 at 09:14:06PM +0000, Martin Michlmayr - Debian Project Leader wrote:
> * Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@pathname.com> [2004-01-24 11:17]:
> > Specifically, I suggest:
> >
> > 1. a single place where review requests should be sent
> > 2. review requests are posted to debian-legal for general discussion
> > 3. an official entity, either a committee or a trusted individual who is
> > able to gauge consensus sufficiently effectively assembles
> > discussion, drafts a response which can be posted here for review
> > prior to returning it
> > 4. response is returned within 30 days of submission
> it does have merit to have one person who summarized a discussion from
> -legal in a coherent fashion and forwards that to upstream. I can
> imagine that many people cannot cope with the volume of mail they get
> when mailing -legal directly; so it would be nice to be able to mail
> -legal for comments, and get a condensed answer back. And, as
> mentioned before, I'll like -legal to be more proactive and talk to
> upstream authors of licenses instead of waiting for them to contact
> us.
Hands up anyone who wants to take on the job of official d-legal summariser. I
can think of a few people who *could* take the job, unfortunately, those
qualified also tend to be those most qualified in other areas.
I certainly *don't* think it should be a committee summary; we've already got
one discussion group (d-legal), no need to add a second one.
A process of:
1) Licence brought to the group; summary requested (to xyz@xyzzy.org).
2) d-legal debates.
3) Consensus summarised by Od-lS; posted to d-legal; shaped, agreed on.
4) Posted back to xyz@xyzzy.org.
Might work. It almost certainly won't be within 30 days, since I wouldn't want
to start making a summary for at least a couple of weeks (late answers
sometimes spark the most debate), and many debates in d-legal go on for *quite*
some time. We don't analyse licences, we debate them, which is a great strength
for d-legal, but sucks for anyone who wants a quick and definitive answer.
Also, the "approval" of the response would take a while to run through.
And then there's the problem that many licences take several "rounds" to get
the nits out of; look at the GFDL discussions. Even once we've come to some
sort of consensus, three months later someone is likely to bring it back up and
we'll come to a different conclusion. I don't think that upstreams (having a
summary in their hand that says "she'll be right, mate") will be overly keen on
having their licence rejected because Branden or Andrew happened to be on holiday
last time[1].
> I'd like to hear what other people from -legal think. I'm certainly
> not going to appoint anyone without the consent of -legal since this
> is just not the way it can work. But perhaps we can find a solution
> together.
I'm not really qualified, but I'll put my hand up to summarise the next
discussion for an upstream who wants it, if nobody else volunteers. GFDL
excluded. I'm not touching that pole. In general, though, the summary work is
probably already done by a DD who is interested in the software, brings the
problematic licence to d-legal, and reports back to upstream about why the
software can't go into Debian, and works with upstream to get it fixed. Look
at the Jasper licence issue - I've been getting a bunch of e-mails from the DD
involved about how the licence is getting reworked. No official d-legal
summary needed.
[1] Not that I'm assuming that either of them necessarily take holidays;
Branden, in particular, doesn't appear to have time for a holiday.
- Matt
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