On Sun, Aug 04, 2002 at 01:57:52PM -0500, Jeff Licquia wrote: > On Sun, 2002-08-04 at 12:47, Steve Langasek wrote: > > On Sun, Aug 04, 2002 at 05:58:19PM +0200, Ralf Treinen wrote: > > > When I sent my ITP on debian-devel today, Moshe Zadka claimed that > > > even distributing maria-viz would be illegal. > > > http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/debian-devel-200208/msg00188.html > > > Can please someone advise whether this is really the case? > > It is ok to redistribute it by itself; if you distribute it with the > > interpreter (which is the case in Debian), I believe the GPL requires you > > to also distribute the interpreter's source under the GPL. Therefore, if > > the interpreter is not GPL-compatible, the letter of the GPL says you > > cannot distribute this script in Debian. > Forgive my ignorance, but is this the general policy for GPL packages in > contrib that depend on packages in non-free? It's been often quoted > that "contrib and non-free are not part of Debian"; I'm wondering if > this determination has an effect on the licensing question. > The idea in my head is that contrib and non-free are "separate". Of > course, if you create a contrib/non-free CD, you might have problems, > but I thought that Debian didn't make any guarantees about third-party > distribution of non-free. The ignorance appears to have been mine; I assumed that the interpreter was GPL-incompatible, but still free. If it's non-free, then we don't risk shipping them together, since non-free, main, and contrib are each regarded separately, and Debian does not ship non-free as part of the standard CD sets. We even go so far as to warn distributors about the potential legal tangles of shipping non-free; this is just one more. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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