Re: GPL-3 & openssl: provide a -nossl variant for a library
Matthias Urlichs <matthias@urlichs.de> writes:
> Nevertheless, it is the forum where we-as-a-distribution are supposed to
> arrive at a rough consensus on what's OK, legally, and what is not, thus
> the discussion belongs there.
It's never been used that way for as long as I've been a project member.
Instead, it's a discussion forum where lots of people argue about licenses
before, during, and after the ftp-master team makes a final decision on
the license. As near as I can tell, those two threads are parallel and
have almost nothing to do with each other. (Almost nothing in the sense
that I think the ftp-master team looks at individual messages that have
good arguments, so they don't completely ignore that discussion.)
On multiple occasions, the people who participate in debian-legal have
reached what would appear to outsiders to be a consensus that's contrary
to what the project actually does, and the project has just ignored them.
I advise people to ignore that list, or at least treat it with a lot of
skepticism, since for people just trying to solve problems it's usually
more confusing than helpful. Many of the active participants historically
have been advocates of a much more restrictive approach to licenses than
what Debian actually does. It's usually more immediately useful to just
upload the package with an explanation of the issues in debian/copyright
and see what the ftp-master team says.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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