Re: AT&T source code agreement
On Wed, Mar 22, 2000 at 02:42:42PM -0500, Stephen C. North wrote:
> > A user needs to
> > be able to modify the software, period, without having to take any other
> > action to enable them to perform that action legally.
> >
>
> Is this Elie's opinion or is it clearly stated in the Debian Free Software
> Guidelines?
This is at least the spirit of the guidelines; I am not a license
nit-picker, and I leave the license arguments in general to those
who have more time on their hands.
> Either way, the AT&T source code agreement section 4.2 states that a
> licensee is only
> obliged to make the patches available to AT&T when they are distributed
> externally.
It is my understanding that other people need to be able to freely
redistribute their own hacked versions as well, or it goes into the
non-free section.
> (I think the lawyers left a hole here regarding distribution of binaries
> compiled from
> modified source, if you'd like me to bring this to their attention :-)
This is not an out for debian.
> Hey, no one even objected to the prohibition against framing the AT&T
> website yet!
We don't care about that.
I don't rule out someone distributing software licensed with the
current license as part of non-free; if a maintainer wants to jump
through whatever hoops are required, they are free to do so. I
think if you got rid of the requirement to resubmit patches, there
would be a better chance of a debian developer picking up the non-
free package.
--
Elie Rosenblum That is not dead which can eternal lie,
http://www.cosanostra.net And with strange aeons even death may die.
Admin / Mercenary / System Programmer - _The Necronomicon_
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