Establishing dialog between the Debian project and OGC regarding Document & Software Notice terms
Hi Thorsten,
A recurring problem with geospatial software in the Free Software
community and Debian in particular has been the terms of the OGC
Document Notice and Software Notice licenses. The problematic OGC
license terms were first discussed with you after the rejection of
TinyOWS [0]. The discussion triggered by the rejection raised some
issues [1] that to this day cannot be resolved because we've not been
able to establish a dialog between the Debian FTP masters and OGC.
In February 2015 the problematic OGC licenses were discussed on the
OSGeo standards list [2], because the PyCSW project and its packaging
was affected by the same issues as TinyOWS [3]. OGC followed that
discussion and wants "to do whatever possible to ensure that OGC
licensing is not a hurdle".
OGC has provided George Percivall (CC'ed) as a contact point to discuss
the OGC license terms, and I hope that you can fulfill this role on the
Debian side as a representative of the FTP masters. If you are not
willing or able to fulfill this role, do you have any suggestions who
would be a good contact in Debian to discuss the licensing issues with
people from OGC?
Scott Simmons (also CC'ed) informed me [4] that they never heard back
from Debian when they tried to discuss this issue. Since I directed them
to the general ftpmaster@ contact and that didn't work out, I'm now
addressing you personally since you were the FTP master to reject these
packages and involved in the follow-up discussion.
[0]
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-January/017300.html
[1]
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-January/017321.html
[2]
https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/standards/2015-February/000834.html
[3]
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-November/024520.html
[4]
https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/standards/2015-November/000937.html
Kind Regards,
Bas
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