Re: Possible copyright violation wrt SNNS
On 2000-05-23 at 08:37 -0500, Steve Greenland wrote:
> On 23-May-00, 00:56 (CDT), Mike Bilow <mikebw@colossus.bilow.com> wrote:
> > This would be my position: once you edit in the "debian" subdirectory, you
> > are modifying the source tree. I don't see any way of satisfying the
> > license other than by distributing source patches and letting the user
> > build, as is done with Pine. This is annoying at best, and the Pine
> > license is actually one of the principal motivations for Mutt.
>
> There's (possibly) two issues: distributing modified source, and
> distributing a binary that was built from the modified source. Debian
> is okay on the former: we distribute the upstream source + patch. We're
> not okay on the latter. But most licenses that restrict the former also
> restrict the latter (or don't mention it at all, which is equivalent, in
> my opinion).
My reading of the snns license is that distributing a binary version is
allowed, as long as it is built from unmodified source. The license is
quite expansive in terms of what can be done with unmodified source. In
fact, the license explicitly says that it is the same as GPL except for
the provision that you cannot distribute modified source or derivatives of
modified source (which would include binaries built from modified source),
so I would take that as a fairly clear endorsement.
As a practical matter, the distinction is irrelevant to snns since the
unmodified source violates Debian Policy substantially enough that it
would not even be eligible for non-free. While it might get the binary
back into Debian if the upstream maintainer accepted the suggested changes
from the Debian maintainer, this would leave the package effectively
unmaintainable by the Debian maintainer in the future.
As a side note, the act of changing the binary file name (to "snns.xgui"
instead of "xgui") has no copyright implications because the title of the
file is not subject to copyright. (There might be trademark implications,
but not copyright implications.) The Debian source patch would have to be
careful to modify the file name after the build is complete, as stupid as
that sounds, since modifying the original Makefile would violate the
license. The snns license is really evil well beyond any intent its
authors could possibly have possessed.
-- Mike
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