Re: ITP: xengine

[Remco Blaakmeer <remco-blaakmeer@quicknet.nl>]

On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Atsuhito Kohda wrote:

> I can understand what you say. 
> 
> - But as you can see, the copyright only shows the fundamental and
>   rough intention of the author. It does not show strict conditions
>   on every situations like GPL. The programmer is not lawyer in general.

It doesn't need to be as strict as the GPL. But it needs to tell you what
you are allowed to do.

> - The copyright allows the distribution without charge explicitly but
>   doesn't say anything about selling the software as you pointed out.
>   So at least from the logical poit of view, it can not be concluded
>   that it prohibits the distribution with charge.

I am sorry, but software licenses don't work that way. If something isn't
allowed by the license, you aren't allowed to do it.

In the extreme case, when there is no license at all, you aren't allowed
to do anything at all with the software.

> - There are some ambiguities in the copyright, I agree. But it
>   is the author who can determine whether it is allowed or not
>   to sell the software.

Yes, he (and only he) can determine that. And he writes down exactly what
is allowed and this document is called "license".

Here is the license again:

     Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute without charge this
     software, documentation, images, etc. is granted, provided that this
     comment and the author's name is retained. The author assumes no
     responsibility for lost sleep as a consequence of use of this
     software.

The simplest thing to do would be to ask the author to change the "without
charge" part to "with or without charge". Then the license would be all
OK for Debian.

Alternatively, you could ask the author to change the license to the GPL. 
For the best way to do this, please read the part of the GPL below the
heading "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs", near the end of
it. You can find the GPL at /usr/doc/copyright/GPL on your Debian system.

I believe you think the author has good intentions and wants his program
to be included in Debian. If this is true, it should not be difficult to
persuade him to change the license.

Remco
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