Hello Christian,
On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 03:14:39PM +0100, Christian PERRIER wrote:
> The mentions in the "offending" files mentioned in this bug report are
> very clearly copy and paste that was made without thinking by the
> people who did so.
While this is most likely true (especially for those with a truncated
license) I don't know if you can say so for sure. Maybe some of the
authors liked the license[1]? In some (e.g. de_AT, ca_FR) I see a point
of contact mentioned, probably finding their (unfortunately not given)
e-mail adress and contacting them could resolve them quickly?
Probably _POSIX served as an example? I think the author of this file
should be the first contact.
> A very good example are the wo_SN, ca_AD, eu_FR (and maybe a few
> others), which I am the author of. So, yes, I am one of those people
> who didn't even imagine that people would consider locale files as
> somethign that could have a licence?
Yes, at least in the EU collections (even if the individual entries
are public knowledge) have a copyright so I thinks (IANAL) that a
license is in order.
> It was definitely not my intent to give a licence to a collection of
> information that indeed belongs to the public domain. And, still, I
> blindly and carelessly copied information from another locale.
I suggest putting a proper license on them for your entries, as
»public domain« is not a universal concept but a license is. A simply
BSD one should suffice, then.
> So, I wonder whether the following:
> # Distribution and use is free, also for
> # commercial purposes.
> should be considered a "licence".
>
> So, really, considering this as RC for files where even the fact that
> a licence can apply to, is highly debatable. I therefore suggest that
> an exception is granted for squeeze to give time to "fix" this:
Since some of them are rather old I think having some more time to fix
this (i.e. beyond the release of Squeeze) would be appropriate.
> - either by rewriting the offending locales....which would indeed
> be just copy and paste, as such information has, by definition, only
> one form
First I would try to contact the original authors where possible.
Maybe rewriting would then be unecessary.
> - or by "relicensing" them (which I'll do immediately for locales I
> wrote, putting them in the public domain).
I'd suggest going for BSD or similar, see above.
> Release team, would you be OK to grant an exception for locales ad bug
> #555168? The alternative would of course be to downgrade this bug to
> severoty important (imho, it should be "minor", even).
I'd also ask for an exception.
[1] This is especially true since several entries are from ISO (cf.
de_AT, or especially POSIX) and here copyright is taken care of
very carefully (at least usually). But maybe they simply did not
think about modification - a mail to Keld Simonsen (he explicitly
lists the ISO comittee, he might have the history and contact
details of the other authors) should clarify that.
--
Dr. Helge Kreutzmann debian@helgefjell.de
Dipl.-Phys. http://www.helgefjell.de/debian.php
64bit GNU powered gpg signed mail preferred
Help keep free software "libre": http://www.ffii.de/
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature