Re: Debian packaging and (possible) Eterm license violations
Ed Hill writes:
> Hi folks,
>
> I'm an occasional Debian user and, while doing package reviews for
> Fedora Extras, stumbled into the Eterm mix-of-source-licenses situation
> described below.
>
> The following email was sent to the Debian Eterm maintainer. I'm
> forwarding it to this list because I've not (yet) received a response
> and because I'm curious what "right thing to do" is within the Debian
> packaging rules (or conventions or...?) for cases such as this one.
This kind of licensing conflict is a release-critical bug in the
package under Debian Policy. The ideal solution for Debian is exactly
what you suggested in the bug comments: work with the upstream
maintainer to sort out license incompatibilities. Poorer solutions
are to change just the Debian package by finding compatibly-licensed
alternatives or ripping out the conflicting code.
As a purely pedantic note, the enlightenment/eterm CVS browser at
SourceForge makes it looks like grkelot.[ch] are under the same
BSD-with-advertising license that Michael Jennings' "the rest" code
uses. Not specifically mentioned in the bug report is the (L)GPL
incompatibility with the classic advertising clause that is used for
the BSD-licensed portions.
(If you follow debian-legal, I apologize for cc'ing you directly, but
it seemed the more reliable way to get the response through.)
Michael Poole
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