Re: DFSG vs Pine's legal notices: where exactly is the gotcha?
Andrea Borgia wrote:
> Santiago Vila wrote:
> SV>No, if Debian accepts a special permission from UW to distribute modified
> SV>binaries, they will never see the need to make pine free software.
>
> This might be true, but I'm more interested in the opposite question: do you
> seriously believe that Debian refusing Pine for that reason will actually
> force UW to make it free? Pardon me if I don't hold my breath waiting for
> that to happen ;-)
Well, I'm really not interested in the opposite question ;-)
I seriously believe that Debian should follow pine license strictly
and not accept any special permission "only for Debian".
This is written in the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and I believe
it's a guideline we should follow for non-free software as well.
Debian is about free software, non-free software should not be treated
*more* favourably than free software in the Debian archives.
Consider this as a matter of principles, if you like. I think Debian
should only distribute whatever everybody would be allowed to
distribute by just reading the license.
> Fine, then ship an unmodified version. Just run configure with the
> appropriate values, pack the resulting binary and we should all be set.
An "unmodified pine" on a Debian system? No, thanks, I don't want to
see configuration files in /usr/local/lib.
It seems to me that you have not even tried to compile the Debian
version of pine, have you? Please "apt-get source pine" and compile it
yourself. If you look at the size of the .diff maybe you will realize
why shipping an unmodified pine would be a very bad idea.
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