W liście z śro, 17-07-2002, godz. 08:59, Markus Klink pisze: > What I do not understand: > > 1. Sun grants the right to distribute it, if the distributor makes sure > that no one sues Sun resulting out of the use of suns package. There's really NO way to "make sure". Anyone can sue Sun (maybe even "for fun") because of software you distributed (be it javahelp). That has nothing to do with your license - the license of you software. If someone decided to sue sun - he did it and there's really nothing you can do to prevent this from happening. According to the license - then you pay for Sun's expenses etc. > 2. ArgoUML which would use javahelp states in its license that states > that the software is provided "as is" and " > IN NO EVENT SHALL THE > UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BE LIABLE TO ANY PARTY FOR DIRECT, INDIRECT, > SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOST PROFITS, > ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE AND ITS DOCUMENTATION" > > Does that not cover javahelp too, in a way that our license supercedes > suns license. Your license is the license of YOUR part of software, you distribute other software, like javahelp as they were licensed by the upstream (sun). You would have to re-license javahelp which you cannot do ;-) > Sun does not want to get sued, we don't want to get sued. So what? Someone may want to sue Sun, no matter if that makes any sense or not. And if he used the software you distributed - you pay. > Both say so and te user decides whether he can live with that or not. So > where is the problem, especially since we never want to modify the > javax.* packages as they are standard java extensions Unfortunatelly AFAIR it is still legally unsure if "no liability" clause in free (or any) software licenses has the power of preventing liability of the authors. I am not US citizen, but from what I read - that is still not sure. > How will debian deal with that? There's really not that much Java that is part of Debian distro - when you mean "main" section - only DFSG-free software [1]. There's a lot of Java software in "contrib" - which contain DFSG-free software which unfortunatelly requires some non-free software to run. non-free here doesn't mean it IS or MUST BE in "non-free" section of Debian - no! As well the user can be left on his own when he has to find, download and install that non-free software. Usually the user only needs non-free Java package. After that he usually can just "apt-get install 'any_Java_package'" w/o problems. Making ArgoUML dependant on another non-free and non-distributable package would just make it harder to get working ArgoUML. There are however technical ways to ease this. On of them is package that fetches that non-free, non-distributable software automaticly from the Internet, then creates new deb package, then installs it. Somebody from d-legal please correct me if I am wrong - but we can have such installer package in "contrib" section I think. > Remain free of any serious java application which uses standards? That is not really problem of Debian. That is the problem of Sun, which made it legally hard and then even impossible to create free implementation of what you usually find in every non-free "java" package. Sun was forced by Apache Software Foundation to open the license and allow free implementations. See [2] [3] [4] for details. So it is slowly beginning to look better. Kaffe [5] has just released their new version 1.0.7 after 2 years w/o release. Gnu Classpath [6] project is working hard to get free implementation of Java Classpath. See [7] to learn about the status. Summarizing - we, in Debian will be slowly moving Java programms from "contrib" to main - as we, Developers have time to dig in the programs to get them working with free tools only and as the tools get better. I'd like to have ArgoUML in "main" too someday. Like it or not but if you make ArgoUML non-free-javahelp dependant, and the day will come that this is the only non-free piece I need to compile ArgoUML (I mean - [*] I'll be able to compile and use the rest using free tools only) - I probably just ripe all that javahelp stuff out (for Debian package). Unfortunatelly [*] doesn't seem to happen anytime soon. Best regards Grzegorz Prokopski [1] http://www.debian.org/social_contract [2] http://apachetoday.com/story/2002-03-26-001-06-PS-CY.html [3] http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/10_998071 [4] http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,6757,00.asp [5] http://www.kaffe.org/ [6] http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/classpath.html [7] http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/status.html
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