Re: infos about alien licenses

[Wolfgang Lonien <wolfgang@lonien.de>]

Hi Matt & list,

Matthew Palmer wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 13, 2006 at 06:12:59AM +0200, Wolfgang Lonien wrote:
>>>> The TwistedSNMP-0.3.13/license.txt reads:
>>>> THIS SOFTWARE IS NOT FAULT TOLERANT AND SHOULD NOT BE USED IN ANY
>>>> SITUATION ENDANGERING HUMAN LIFE OR PROPERTY.
>>> This is possibly problematic, depending on how you define "should".  I'd
>>> take it as just being a restatement of the whole "no warranty, if it breaks
>>> you get to keep both pieces" thing,
>> Yeah. Interestingly (as a side-note), I have read something like this
>> before. It's in the Windows License concerning the use of Sun's Java. I
>> think it means something like: "If you use this to steer an airplane and
>> that crashes, don't blame us - we warned you". Not very reassuring IMHO.
> 
> Practically, though, that's no less than you get with every other piece of
> software -- free or otherwise.
> 
>>> but it could be read as forbidding use
>>> in the mentioned areas.
>> ... which would be against the policy, right?
> 
> Yes, it would discriminate against fields of endeavour, and hence fail
> DFSG #<mumble>.
> 
>> Hmmm. I wonder if that
>> still could be packaged, and where to - contrib? non-free? The latter, I
>> suppose?
> 
> If it doesn't pass the DFSG (but we can legally distribute it), then it goes
> in non-free.  If it depends on non-free stuff, but is itself free, then it
> goes in contrib.  So twisted-snmp would go in non-free, and the dependent
> application would go in contrib.
> 
> I don't think that the clause is necessarily a problem, though -- it reads
> to me more like a slightly more emphatic no-warranty clause, rather than a
> prohibition against use in any particular field.

Yes, I see it like this, too. Henning Makholm said that all 3 licenses
were BSD-like, and so they're ok for us. But I wasn't sure, that's why I
addressed debian-legal before doing any packaging.

So what should I do in this case? Contact the upstream and ask him/her
to change that license? Or do we accept this? I'll leave that open to
discussion here for the moment.

Thanks and cheers,
wjl aka Wolfgang Lonien
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