Re: Draft Debian-legal summary of the LGPL
@ 12/05/2004 16:33 : wrote Henning Makholm :
Scripsit Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org>
Not because the LGPL doesn't deserve a summary, but because it hasn't
been done right. The entire license needs to be posted and carefully
scrutinized.
Well, exactly in the LGPL case we don't need to scrutinize the entire
license. We can do with noticing that any work covered by the LGPL is
effectively dual-licensed with pure GPL, so the freedom of the former
follows from freedom of the latter.
That is right.
A detailed analysis of the GPL might be an interesting exercise. But
I'm afraid that it has several points where our best argument that it
is free is that it is explicitly grandfathered by the DFSG.
I did today (and posted here) a somewhat detailed analysis of the GPL,
not really under the DFSG pov, but under a What Are My Rights pov.
Someone can use it as a starting point. However, I tried to do the same
of the LGPL, and is much more convoluted, and I couldn't work it out in
time. Maybe tomorrow.
One could make a good case that our historical application of the DFSG
can be approximated very closely by the rule of thumb that we accept
any requirements found in the GPL (or one of the other grandfathered
licenses) as free, and reject every clause that goes beyond what the
DFSG requires of a distributor.
Of course there are a small number of buts here - most prominently (a)
the explicit patch rule in the DFSG, (b) that we traditionally accept
advertising clauses, but grudgingly, and (c) that we don't require
licenses to offer the "written promise valid for three years" option
if they require co-distribution of source with binaries.
Yeah, but if they require forced co-distribution, I understand that they
are considered generally non-DFSG-free.
I agree that we should not try to audit licenses that do not apply to
any actual or intended Debian packages.
I would go further and say we should try to audit the license that apply
to actual current Debian packages.
Not that it would matter much; if somebody really wanted to use
http://www.debian.org/legal as a platform for a personal vendetta
against a license - and he could get d-l to agree that the license is
non-free - then it would be a simple matter for him to let a proxy (or
pseudonym) file an ITP and formally request a summary of the license.
This is true.
--
br,M
Reply to: