Re: When should -legal contact maintainers [Was: Re: Question for candidate Robinson]
On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, Sven Luther wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 12:23:26AM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote:
> > If -legal is specifically discussing a license of a package, the
> > maintainer is generally informed[1]
>
> 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.
In this particular case, the package and license combination that
brought up the QPL was libcwd (#251983).[1] To be honest, no one seems
to have equated the libcwd discussion about QPL being non-free with
the ocaml discussion about the QPL being GPL incompatible until Brian
Sniffen brought it up,[2] and since you're in the Maintainer: field on
ocaml, you were notified. [This isn't particularly surprising as it's
almost impossible to figure out what licenses packages are under in
Debian in an automated fashion.]
> > 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.
Dual licensing under the QPL and GPL (or as actually suggested, QPL +
LGPL[3]) would have solved both the DFSG freedom issues with the QPL,
and the ocaml emacs binding issues of #227159. It may not be the
optimal solution for ocaml, but it would have solved the immediate
problems.
> > 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 ?
I'd hope that maintainers wouldn't get angry,[4] and instead be
willing to help discuss the issues (or lack thereof) that make the
changed serverity of the bug reasonable or unreasonable. After all,
it's not like we're making up these issues purely to spite
maintainers. In most cases, reasonable people have examined the
issues, discussed them, and felt there was enough of a problem to
warrant bothering a package maintainer about it.
After all, things change, and a bug that was normal severity today may
end up being RC tomorrow.
> 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.
I'm afraid I cannot parse what you're trying to say here.
Don Armstrong
1: http://people.debian.org/~terpstra/message/20040709.215918.1224a82f.en.html
2: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=227159&msg=65
3: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=227159&msg=41
4: But then, bts ping-pong doesn't happen because maintainers are
always calm...
--
What I can't stand is the feeling that my brain is leaving me for
someone more interesting.
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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