Re: debian-legal review of licenses
Martin Michlmayr - Debian Project Leader <leader@debian.org> writes:
> * Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net> [2004-02-12 01:03]:
>> It would be hard to preserve that attitude if we were to begin to
>> contact authors unsolicited. It would be very bad publicity for
>> Debian and for the free-software movement in general if too many
>> people start
>
> ... well, it depends who you contact and how you do it. I'm mainly
> thinking of licenses which are OSI compliant but not DFSG compliant.
> Clearly, those people are interested in "Open Source", and in that
> case I think a polite e-mail showing the differences between OSI's
> definition and the DFSG and explaining our philosophy is warranted.
I'm a bit unclear at this point what problem we're trying to solve. To
date, I think there are four potentially interesting cases:
- Someone brings license to d-l, short discussion ensues with rapid
conclusion.
- Someone brings license to d-l, and no one answers. This may be
because it gets lost (this happened once or twice during the GFDL
discussion, iirc). I've also seen cases where no one answers
apparently because the license hangs on a controversial issue and no
one's willing to take a stand on it and rehash old flame wars.
- Someone brings a license to d-l, and flame wars result.
- And what you mention above, where no one brings a license to us but we
notice an OSI certified license that's not DFSG free.o
I'd say the clear majority of cases fall into the first category, and
I'm not convinced that case is broken. Generally that works well
because the DD who brought it to us (or sometimes non-DD) gets a clear
response and either goes ahead with packaging, or talks to upstream
(with whom the DD often has a good relationship). Occasionally the DD
disagrees with us and flame wars result, but that's a separate issue.
The second case is unfortunate, but I don't think it happens terribly
often, and when it does it's usually caught by someone sooner or later.
Perhaps something could be done here, but it's (IMHO) not worth a lot of
work finding a solution as it's not that big a problem.
The third case seems to be the sticky one, but I'm not convinced any of
the solutions suggested actually help there. If you're assuming that
d-l is having trouble reaching a conclusion (e.g., GFDL), how are
systems, appointees, and so on, going to help? Perhaps when this
happens we should be more quick to set up someplace for folks to get a
current summary of things. This eventually happened in the GFDL debate,
and it worked well in the end. This can probably be done on an
as-needed, volunteer basis, though.
And as for the last case, I personally wouldn't want to touch it with a
10' pole. It's hard enough talking to people about licensing issues
without first having to interest someone who probably doesn't care.
Though a polite ping, just to see if the licensor is interested, may
make sense.
--
Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
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