Re: Is this Debian-specific?
Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es> writes:
> There is a package in main with the following copyright notice:
The package is 'mirror'. Is that secret?
> Permission to modify the software is granted, but not the right to
> distribute the modified code. Modifications are to be distributed as
> patches to released version.
The DFSG specifically allows licenses to request modifications to be
distributed as patch files. However, in that case the license needs to
*specifically* allow distribution of binaries built from modified
sources. It's not clear that the licence does that: "code" could mean
either source code or machine code.
Hm <later> looking around it turns out that the code is a Perl script,
so no binaries are actually involved. However, in that case the .deb
must contain modified Perl code which the license specifically forbids.
On the other hand, the email from the author that goes with the
license statement seems to indicate that he thinks Debian-style
packaging is OK.
This rises two questions:
1: is a vaguely formulated emailed statement of intention legally
binding enough to be OK for the DFSG.
2: should we interpret the email as being "specific to Debian" simply
because the author made his statement in the context of a request
for clarification on behalf of the Debian maintainer?
In both cases I suppose arguments either way could be made.
> If it is not Debian-specific, it is *unreasonable* to ask the author to
> reword the license
No, I don't think so.
--
Henning Makholm
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