Intent to package amiwm; DFSG ramblings
I'm planning on packaging the amiwm window manager. It's an AmigaOS
lookalike WM, with multiple workspaces and a customizable tools menu
(but
it doesn't support submenus as yet, so menu package support will have
to wait
for this upgrade).
Anyway, it looks like it's going to have to be in non-free. I
contacted the author on the copyright, and this is what he said:
---Marcus Comstedt <marcus@lysator.liu.se> wrote:
> I'm aware that the copyright statement is very fuzzy and I'll try to
> supply a better one in future distributions (if any). Anyway, the
license
> for amiwm does _not_ contain a generic license to produce derived
works
> using my source code. I'll probably grant licenses to specific
derived
> works should someone ask me, but no such license is given implicitly
with
> the software. I'll allow distribution of patches in the form of diffs
> though. My filosofy here is that I don't want people to confuse bugs
> written by other people with the bugs written by me. ;)
Since there's no implicit derived works license, my understanding is
that this contravenes DFSG section #4, which requires an explicit
license (and it would have to be a non-exclusive one).
Anyway, perhaps we need to look at providing a section between
"contrib" and "non-free" that allows for software that is
redistributable without restrictions but is not DFSG-free (i.e. stuff
that people can stick on CD-ROMs without wandering through every
copyright file in non-free), or at least a convention for tagging
non-free packages as CD-ROMable. This would be consistent with our
goal of making it "easy for people to produce CD-ROMs of our system
without violating any licenses, import/export restrictions, or any
other laws" (per Policy) and would not compromise the ideological
purity of the DFSG.
Chris
==
Chris Lawrence Email: quango@ix.netcom.com
Senior Political Science Major
University of Memphis Contract Programmer
Memphis, Tennessee, USA FedEx - Operations Research
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