Re: DRAFT: debian-legal summary of the QPL
MJ Ray said on Sun, Jul 11, 2004 at 10:24:26AM +0100,:
> Personally, I'm not sure that is as much of a problem as the
> requirement to distribute unpublished mods to a central authority on
> request. I'd be interested to know whether this aspect of the tests is
> grounded in the DFSG, and see that information added to the FAQ.
At some point of generalisation, this becomes an issue of striking a
balance between a particular user's right to keep his modifications to
himself, and right of the community as a whole to have access to free
software.
> As you can read elsewhere, I am not convinced that debian-legal is
> equipped or wise to try to analyse licences in abstract.
I'm afraid that this list will have to do both - analyse licenses in
general, and also scturinise specific packages when brought to our
notice.
In the specific case of licenses which are outright non-free, we need
to tell DDs / upstream that packages under a particular license cannot
be in the archives.
Analysis of specific packages would be necessary, when issues like
possible patents, out right license violations, dependency issues,
license incompatibilities, etc. arise.
To me, this seems like a two stage process, we analyse the license
first, and the package later on.
> As I wrote before, I think a summary of consensus on the libcwd
> situation is more useful than a licence summary.
If we decide that because libcwd is solely under the QPL, it cannot be
in main, will some situation arise where application X, also solely
under QPL can be in main?
OTOH, how can we say that libcwd cannot be in main without deciding
whether its license is DFSG compliant or not?
--
Mahesh T. Pai <<>> http://paivakil.port5.com
Free Software - it is free as in FREEDOM
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