Re: debian-legal review of licenses
* Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net> [2004-02-12 01:03]:
> Usually, when we talk to upstream authors, we try to be careful not to
> sound as if we think that we can *demand* that they change their
> license. We try to stress that the upstream author is perfectly
> allowed to set non-free terms for his code if he choses to, but that
> non-free terms would mean that we can't distribute his code in Debian.
Of course. They are certainly free to choose whatever license they
wish. I didn't suggest _demanding_ anything at all. ...
> It would be hard to preserve that attitude if we were to begin to
> contact authors unsolicited. It would be very bad publicity for Debian
> and for the free-software movement in general if too many people start
... well, it depends who you contact and how you do it. I'm mainly
thinking of licenses which are OSI compliant but not DFSG compliant.
Clearly, those people are interested in "Open Source", and in that
case I think a polite e-mail showing the differences between OSI's
definition and the DFSG and explaining our philosophy is warranted.
People _want_ OSI to certify their licenses, but Debian/DFSG currently
is not as important in this regard as OSI. Most people won't come to
us to make sure a license is DFSG compliant as long as it is OSI
compliant. Hence, I think we should approach them to point out these
differences (not to demand anything, just explain our point of view).
In particular, this should be done if it's an important license
because people _will_ use a license if it's OSI certified and many
will generally not care about Debian - it's us who lose, not them,
because we cannot distribute that software (Obviously, they lose as
well, but they don't care as much as we). My prime example is OLS.
Many people (e.g. Alan Cox) think it's a great license, and it will
and is being used by projects. This is a loss for us and for the free
software community, and if possible we should try to make licenses
DFSG free.
--
Martin Michlmayr
leader@debian.org
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