I wrote to the BitTorrent authors about the new license for version 4, and finally received an answer from them. There were 2 issues with this license: 1/ The choice of venue clause; the authors would probably agree to remove it, only keeping the choice of law, which is DFSG-free. 2/ The "keep source online" clause; for those who haven't read the earlier discussion, here is what it looks like: > The Source Code for any version of Licensed Product or > Modifications that you distribute must remain available for at > least twelve (12) months after the date it initially became > available, or at least six (6) months after a subsequent version > of said Licensed Product or Modifications has been made > available. You are responsible for ensuring that the Source > Code version remains available even if the Electronic > Distribution Mechanism is maintained by a third party. Their line of reasoning is that it such a clause is present in several other licenses: the APSL, RPSL, MPL and Jabber licenses. The APSL and RPSL are non-free, so that's not a problem. IIRC, the MPL was said to be problematic because of the clauses talking about patents, not about that one. However, the Jabber license is considered DFSG-free. Unless I'm missing something, we are not respecting these licenses when distributing Mozilla and Jabber in the unstable tree, where the source files aren't kept for 6 months as they should. I don't recall seeing this discussion before, and it strikes me, as, DFSG-free or not, we are violating these people's copyrights. Is there a way to deal with such an issue? -- .''`. Josselin Mouette /\./\ : :' : josselin.mouette@ens-lyon.org `. `' joss@debian.org `- Debian GNU/Linux -- The power of freedom
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