Re: Establishing dialogue between the Debian project and OGC regarding Document & Software Notice terms
Sebastiaan Couwenberg <sebastic@xs4all.nl> wrote:
> Because I've been unable to get feedback from Thorsten Alteholz or any
> of the other FTP masters about this issue, I'm now directing this to
> debian-legal in the hope we can get a dialog going between the Debian
> project and the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium). I'm getting the
> impression that the FTP masters are unwilling to discuss this issue
> because it might constitute legal advise which is problematic in the US,
> or because they only enforce the DFSG and not set the terms of its
> interpretation.
debian-legal does not dispense official Debian advice. It is just a
bunch of people with experience in how Debian looks at legal issues.
So we can not give you an sort of official advice. This applies even
to this email. I am not empowered to give official Debian advice.
With that said, the people behind ftp-master are very busy and do not
have time for lengthy discussions of legal minutiae. They rely on
discussions in debian-legal to sort out the issues and fix obvious
problems.
So in this kind of situation, the usual procedure is to convince
debian-legal that you have fixed the license. Then software with that
new license get's submitted. ftp-master then decides whether they
like the end result.
This has the unfortunate possibility that ftp-master may
disagree with debian-legal. In practice, debian-legal has been more
conservative than ftp-master. So if you get it through debian-legal,
it should be fine with ftp-master.
As for the specifics of this license, the original rejection for TinyOWS
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-January/017300.html
is, I think, clear about what the problem is. You have to allow
modifications. Thorsten's further rejection at
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-January/017321.html
also mentions the ability to freely modify. The "Proposed Text" at
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OGC_XML_Schemas_and_FOSS4G_Software_Distribution
might work, but only if it is a request, not a binding requirement.
That is not clear to me.
Cheers,
Walter Landry
wlandry@caltech.edu
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