Re: Question on a copyright

[Alexander Koch <efraim@argh.org>]

On Sun, 15 November 1998 11:55:13 -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
[the Diablo license]
> > > 5. When this software or any work derived from this software is used
> > >    in a commercial product or bundled with a commercial product,
> > >    the vendor must also produce the program this software is derived
> > >    from for either the Linux or FreeBSD operating systems.  The Linux
> > >    or FreeBSD version of the product must be sold for substantially
> > >    the same amount of money as the product for other platforms,
> > >    and the Linux or FreeBSD releases must be kept up to date with
> > >    the releases for other platforms.
> 
> > This one bothers me, it may fail section 6 of the DFSG, but I'm really
> > not sure, I've not seen one quite like this..
> I'm also not sure this meets the authors intent.

Seems so.

> My call on this is that if the author's intent is the way I think it is
> that this is nonfree.  If it's not it's still a poorly written copyright.

I will most certainly contact the author once I know for myself what the
problem with the wording / this license is (as I don't understand that
much of it and didn't have to think about it). 

> In either case our obligation is to talk to the author and sort things
> out before we distribute this.

As I read this paragraph this only applies to a bundle of a commercial
product with Diablo. This is clearly not the case, I think, depending
on whether Debian considers its distribution commercial.

It's worded rather strangely, but as I read it it gives me all rights
to distribute and modify the source to make it work for Debian.

There's an older license in 1.16, this has changed with one of the last
releases. See

http://home.pages.de/~efraim/copyright.1 (old version)
http://home.pages.de/~efraim/copyright.2 (new version)

for details.

> [Er.. should this really be going to debian-policy?  I've set 
> the reply-to to point at debian-devel.]

I thought that -policy was a better choice in the first place.

Alexander

-- 
Avoid the Gates of Hell. Use Linux.
Alexander Koch - <>< - aka Efraim - PGP - 0xE7694969 - Hannover - Germany