Re: Packaging a software with "moving" licence
On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 12:00:44PM +0100, Florent Bayle wrote:
> Hello,
>
> At http://www.vanheusden.com/unsort/ you can find a piece of software called
> "unsort", which contains a file named "licence.txt" with the following
> contents :
>
> "The license of this program can be obtained from:
> http://www.vanheusden.com/license.txt
> It is actually the GNU Public License."
>
> How could this be interpreted ? Does this means that the licence depends of
> the content of "http://www.vanheusden.com/license.txt";, does that mean that
> the licence of this piece of software can change at any time (even for the
> same release) ? Is it possible to include it in Debian ?
>
> My personal feeling is that we shouldn't include it in Debian "as is", because
> we can't be sure that the licence would remain the same over the time, and
> thus we couldn't guarantee that it will always remains free.
My understanding is that once something is released under such a free
license, its not possible to unrelease it. Someone who hypothetically
gave me to right to modify+distribute their work can't well pretend to
be able to undo that.
In practice, I think its probably fine to deal with software that
might do this, but, as always, its a bad position to make enemies,
especially with the guy who's software you're using/packaging. It
would be nice to have healthy communication with the upstream author,
and would also be good to be able to demonstrate that, at one point,
the contents of /licenese.txt was actually the GPL.
Ideally, the source files would have the GPL header and disclaimer, or
at least something to the effect of "# This file is copyright (C) 2005
Justin Pryzby and released under the terms of the GPLv2 license".
You might start by bringing this up with the author(s).
--
Clear skies,
Justin
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