Re: When should -legal contact maintainers [Was: Re: Question for candidate Robinson]
On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 12:23:26AM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote:
> [This is wildly OT for -vote, MFT set to -legal and CC:'ed, please
> follow up there or privately.]
>
> On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > > On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 12:52:20AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> > > > Still, debian-legal should inform the maintainers and invite them to take
> > > > part of the discussion when examining packages which have been in main for
> > > > years.
> >
> > I think he's right about this. For one thing, as he just explained,
> > he got upset precisely because he wasn't informed; it's reasonable
> > to assume that the way in which his discussion would have been
> > performed would have been 'slightly' different had he been informed
> > in time. I *do* think it is good practice for d-legal contributors
> > to inform a packages' maintainer if they are discussing its license;
> > we do the same with other types of bugs.
>
> If -legal is specifically discussing a license of a package, the
> maintainer is generally informed[1] when the discussion is actually
Can be, and if so it is nice, but it was not in this case, since the first
mention i had was that consensus was reached and my package should move to
non-free. And it was a nominal discussion about my package. And again, the
mail saying the above was CCed to debian-legal, and nobody there bothered to
correct the misconception.
> happening. However, (almost) no one bothers to inform the maintainers
> when general discussion of a license is occuring, in the first part
> because most of the discussion isn't particularly useful to most
> maintainers, and secondly, because people have better things to do[1]
> than track down which packages are covered by a license when the
> critical issues (if any) haven't been discussed or discerned yet.
>
> In the latter stages of the discussion, if there really are issues
> with a license that packages in Debian are using, bugs are typically
> opened against the packages, ideally with a short summary of the
> specific issues that the license has, and suggestions for what the
> maintainer can do to fix the license. (And quite often offers of help
> in explaining the problems to upstream as well.)
And in this case, suggestion was ask upstream to GPL his software or dual
licence, as trolltech did for Qt. not even bothering to examine the package in
questionand noticing that none of the QPLed part of the package was indeed a
library, and thus had no GPL-interaction problems.
This shot first ask later attitude based on half informed guesses and backed
by the fanatism of the debian-legal posters was what mostly irritated me back
then, and also what makes me believe that debian-legal is not to be thrusthed
on licencing issues, which makes ti totally useless.
> As far as the analogy to "normal" bugs goes, the preliminary
> discussion is generally on the order of "is this really a bug?" as is
> typically seen on -devel. [Or, in the extreme case, figuring out
> whether mass bug filing is sane.] Surely no maintainer expects to be
> notified every time someone asks on -user, -devel (or $DEITY forbid,
> IRC[3]) whether specific behavior from a package constitutes a bug.
no, but maintainers get over-angry when people modify the seveirty of one of
their bugs they have been ignoring for age, no ? And this reaction seems to be
backed up by the powers that are, and a real analogy to the "please ask
upstream to GPL his software or we will recomend ftp-masters to remove it from
main" kind of request.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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