Re: debian-legal review of licenses
On Jan 24, 2004, at 14:17, Daniel Quinlan wrote:
However, while debian-legal is a useful forum for discussing the merits
of licenses and possible incompatibilities, an outside group like
Apache
doesn't seem to be able to get a definitive opinion about licenses
under
development. This puts Debian in contrast to other groups such as the
OSI and the FSF.
I think that in all but the most borderline and controversial cases,
-legal manages to come to a strong consensus, nearing unamity. It may
be useful if we wrote up a quick summary to send to relevant parties,
to post to that -legal FAQ I should still write, etc.
Maybe we could do some of this at http://wiki.debian.net/
In cases where we fail to come to consensus, it's rather hard to
provide a simple answer to people.
1. a single place where review requests should be sent
We already have this. debian-legal@lists.debian.org seems to work fine.
2. review requests are posted to debian-legal for general discussion
n/a
3. an official entity, either a committee or a trusted individual who
is
able to gauge consensus sufficiently effectively assembles
discussion, drafts a response which can be posted here for review
prior to returning it
I don't see why we need anything official. Certainly, anyone can post a
draft to the list. People can either endorse it or oppose it.
This does dodge the question of how to determine if a draft was
appropriately endorsed, but we didn't seem to have a problem with,
e.g., Manoj's GFDL one.
4. response is returned within 30 days of submission
Look at how long the GFDL mess went on for. I don't think 30 days is
reasonable for some of the more divisive ones, which are the ones where
people would most likely be confused as to the outcome.
It would be laughably tragic if Debian ends up deciding that future
license revisions like Apache or any other free software project must
end up in non-free.
It is always tragic to have software become non-free.
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