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Re: Is the xdebug's non-free license necessary?



On Mon, 20 Dec 2004, Josh Triplett wrote:

> > I am totally fine if people put it in distributions as php4-xdebug.
> > AFAIK freebsd's ports already have this, and so will Mandrake in the
> > forseeable feature. It would be silly of me to prohibit this, and this
> > is what IMO the license never intended to prohibit.
>
> Even if the Debian package contains differences from the upstream
> version?  Your license only permits use of the name "Xdebug" for
> unmodified versions; as stated above, Debian packages frequently contain
> changes from the upstream versions.  (These patches are generally sent
> upstream, but the Debian maintainer will often apply a patch without
> waiting for a new upstream version containing that patch.)

See, that is something I wouldn't like distributions to do with any code
as it's IMO highly confusing for users if their distributions version of
a package does something not-documented, or something not at all
(although it's documented). Unless it's a security problem a
distribution should be pure (except from perhaps changing some default
directories or something like that). If a distribution wants something
fixed, then they can send a patch to the developer. If it make sense it
will get incorporated, but it's also very possible that a proposed patch
is a bad implementation, or performance killing and in that case a
packaged version will be suboptimal. And there is usually one person
that gets the blame: the author.

regards,
Derick

-- 
Xdebug | http://xdebug.org | xdebug-general@lists.xdebug.org



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