Re: more tolerant licensing for Debian infrastructure
Jaldhar H Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org> writes:
> I strongly agree that if the CDDL is non-DFSG free then we should not
> make any compromises. If however it or any other otherwise
> DFSG-compliant license is merely GPL incompatible then we (or rather
> they who hold copyright) ought to consider it. That's all I'm saying.
Ought to consider it for what, though?
I haven't heard anything about the CDDL that would cause me to argue
against inclusion of CDDL-covered software in the archive, for instance.
(It's possible that it isn't DFSG-free in some obscure way -- I haven't
investigated it closely.) That's not what this thread is about.
What this thread is about is its incompatibility with the GPL in a fashion
that directly affects the legal viability of creating a GNU/Solaris
distribution that includes GPL-covered software. We can't consider
ignoring that; we don't get to ignore bits of licenses that are
inconvenient. Furthermore, that provision in the GPL was specifically
intended to prevent exactly what people are talking about doing,
admittedly for a system libc that was non-free rather than one that is
free but GPL-incompatible.
The simple solution to this problem is for Solaris to change the licensing
on its libc to make it GPL-compatible. The chances of changing the
license on all of the GPL-covered software to make it CDDL-compatible are
remote at best.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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