Re: Bittorrent licensing, take 2 [MPL and Jabber inside]
Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> wrote:
> I wrote to the BitTorrent authors about the new license for version 4,
Thank you for doing that work.
[...]
> Their line of reasoning is that it such a clause is present in several
> other licenses: the APSL, RPSL, MPL and Jabber licenses. The APSL and
> RPSL are non-free, so that's not a problem. IIRC, the MPL was said to be
> problematic because of the clauses talking about patents, not about that
> one. However, the Jabber license is considered DFSG-free.
Can you give a reference for the discussion, please? The Jabber
licence preamble appears to contradict the licence text and I'm
not sure if they're significant. I didn't find matches for legal
in the time around the Sep 2001 package licence change.
jabber.org claims that the jabberd (which I think is what debian
has) is under the GPL. Most of the orig.tar.gz files I checked
offered JOSL and GPLv2+ as alternatives. Maybe the debian/copyright
file is just out-of-date?
> Unless I'm missing something, we are not respecting these licenses when
> distributing Mozilla and Jabber in the unstable tree, where the source
> files aren't kept for 6 months as they should. I don't recall seeing
> this discussion before, and it strikes me, as, DFSG-free or not, we are
> violating these people's copyrights. Is there a way to deal with such an
> issue?
Yes. We apologise and stop distributing things under licences
with which the archive network can't comply, even if it's
not a DFSG problem. I can't think of another way, apart from
redesigning the mirror software.
--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
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