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Proposal for clarification of DFSG.1



Hi,

during the discussion about the legal status of LaTeX2HTML [1], some
people confirmed my interpretation of the DFSG.1. But after some weeks
of intense discussion with the upstream maintainer, he is still not yet
convinced about our argumentation (although possibly ready to change the
LaTeX2HTML license).

While we always interpreted DFSG.1 in the following way:

(A)
=======================================================
  The license of a Debian component may not restrict
  any party from selling or giving away the software
- as a component of an aggregate software distribution
- containing programs from several different sources.
+ .
  The license may not require a royalty or other fee
  for such sale.
=======================================================

There's a different way possible:

(B)
=======================================================
  The license of a Debian component may not restrict
  any party from selling or giving away the software
  as a component of an aggregate software distribution
  containing programs from several different sources.
+ (But may prohibit selling the software itself alone.)
  The license may not require a royalty or other fee
  for such sale.
=======================================================

There seems to be a consensus about (A) on debian-devel because I'm sure
that if it were controversial, there would have been a much bigger
thread.

But the maintainer of LaTeX2HTML (indirectly) suggested (B) instead of
changing "his" license for historical reasons. While this clearly
shouldn't be a single reason for us to change the DFSG, alternative (B)
was obviously considered by Herbert Xu and Manoj Srivastava when they
initially packaged LaTeX2HTML for Debian.

I guess that latex2html will not be the only package having an
"anti-commerce" license, because I came across the issue [2] just by
accident and this kind of "individual license" is quite popular.
Therefore I propose the change expressed under (A) to prevent such
confusion of interpretation of the DFSG in the future.

Otherwise we would have to do (B) but this seems to violate DFSG.8.

Thanks.

bye,
  Roland

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200310/msg00383.html
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/204684

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