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Re: "Waqf" General Public License in Debian?



On Fri, Jul 02, 2010 at 12:21:51AM +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
> 1) I'm generally quite sceptical about putting religious stuff into
> Debian (regardless of which religion we're talking about). This simply
> opens the gates for so many problems, politically, morally, etc.
> Perhaps a separate "project" would be a better place.

The DFSG doesn't mention religion (or other characteristics) at all, and
rightly so. It's not for the project to discriminate on those grounds.

I consider the (translated) license to be non-free on other grounds though;
the first term is an obvious clause to pick on.

> 2) How can the ftp-masters actually check whether this complies with the
> DFSG. As far as I can see from the English translation, it is not
> legally binding, and only the Arabic version is.
> I guess none of our ftp-masters can read this, but even if, end-users
> can not, so I guess people have not change in reading the license they
> agree to.
> I guess it's common sense that licenses should have a legally binding
> version in English, which is kind of the international language.

I guess (IANAL) that if it ever came to court, a sensible judge would take
a translation from a trusted body in a language acceptable to the court.

> 3) The license contains many places which can be considered
> discriminatory, racist or fundamentalist.
> Apart from that... religious stuff shouldn't go into a license.

There's a lot of prose in the preamble, but it's mostly meaningless as far
as the actual clauses go.


-- 
Jonathan Wiltshire

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