Re: Squeak in Debian?
> > Are we sure this is what those weasle words mean? Not that I am fully
> > up on lawyer-speak, but I read the "applicable laws" as "laws referring
> > to software, cryptography, etc." That is, I read it as, you must follow
> > the relevant US export laws but you do not have to follow all of US
> > export law.
> Not sure, but the first one ('when such distribution is prohibited by law')
> *definitely* means this, and we've assumed that the other clauses meant
> about the same thing (it's quite a normal goal).
This seems rather important. If your reading is wrong then people using
Debian-approved software can end up in nasty court cases that they lose.
Shouldn't we have a reliable basis for understanding what the clause
means? I thought Debian was normally pretty paranoid about ambiguous
license phrases.
>From a little Googling, I can't find anyone who has a strong basis for
knowing what is meant by either "applicable" or "when such disrtibution
is prohibited by law". The only thing I found was one single discussion
about a different package that was ITP'd for Debian; in that thread
there was, as in the presen thread, a simple and flippant claim that it
is nothing to worry about.
> > Note that your reading makes all of these clauses NOP's.
> Bascially, yes.
>
> Actually, they're not entirely NOPs. They mean "if you break the law, then
> in addition to the legal penalties, we can *also* terminate your license".
>
> We don't accept clauses stronger than that, ones which force people to obey
> random US laws which they are otherwise not bound by.
It should be fine in non-free, however, so long as it would not cause
our non-free infrastructure to break the license and so long as it does
not add unacceptible liability to Debian. Since much of our non-free
infrastructure is in the US, I would think we must follow US export law
anyway, even on non-free servers that are not in the US.
But maybe I misunderstand how the non-free infrastructure is set up. Do
we in fact have non-free servers that, say, export to Cuba? If so, how
do we justify mirroring stuff between those servers and US-based
servers?
-Lex
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