Re: RFC: GPL plus securities industry disclaimer suitable for main?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org>]

On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 11:18:57AM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
> Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> 
> > One such CRAN package, GPL'ed and all, was written by someone in the
> > financial industry which happens to be one of the preferred habitats of
> > layers, and so it carries an extra rider.  Could you good souls please opine
> > if the following debian/copyright is ok for inclusion in Debian main?
> 
> Why do you want to include it?  I can't see any indication that you have

Same reason as for other packages I maintain: Because it is very useful code.

> to force others to accept these terms if you redistribute the software.
> 
> If there is indeed such a requirement, we cannot distribute the software
> at all because the choice-of-law clause is generally viewed as
> incompatible with the GPL.

That's what we have to sort through. It looks as if the employer of its'
author was sympathetic (and allowed a GPL release) but that the lawyers were
overzealous and put a hard constraint i,n which invalidates the whole effort.

If we can pin-point what the problem is, we have a chance at solving the
issue, and may just end up being able to redistribute this.

Dirk

-- 
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
                                                -- Groucho Marx