Re: Please give opinion about "Bug#509287: afio: license is non-free"
severity 509287 important
thanks
Hi Erik,
On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 01:00:16AM +0100, Erik Schanze wrote:
> Dear debian-legal folks,
> I got a Bug against package "afio" because of licence problems.
> Please see http://bugs.debian.org/509287.
> There was already a similar Bug 9 years ago that was closed, after one
> person from this list gave his OK.
> (http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/1999/05/msg00162.html)
> But I think it's not that easy. It seems the clause is problematic.
> There is an ongoing discussion on a Redhat list
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=449037 and they excluded
> the package already. There is an other blog on
> http://www.kernelplanet.org/fedora/ that gave a summary of the current
> situation.
> What should I do?
> Have I move afio to non-free?
Well, http://spot.livejournal.com/303000.html misses the point by a long
shot. The original license is not non-free because of prohibitions on sale;
there are other licenses we've accepted as free that prohibit direct sale of
the software, so long as they allow commercial distribution of the software
in a bundle with other software. It's not a *good* license, but it's not a
non-free license for failing DFSG#1. If you read the full text of DFSG#1,
it's clear that the wording was informed by just such licenses as this.
Rather, the original license is non-free because it lacks any permission to
*modify*. Since this is not a right that we have by default under
copyright, if we don't have a license from the copyright holder to modify
this software, then it fails DFSG#3.
The question is, do we have permission to modify it? Tom Calloway claims
that the later licensing notice is invalid because:
[S]omeone (oh mysterious unknown person of the internets) decided that
afio was pretty darned useful and uploaded it to sunsite (which used to be
a pretty good place to dump useful UNIXy things that you found on the
internets). At some point, someone at SunSite (again, this person's name
is lost to the internets) decided to redefine the licensing terms. [...]
Thus, whoever wrote it, took a big leap in IANAL licensing and decreed
that the "software package as a whole" may be distributed under any method
that meets the Artistic or LGPL license".
So in point of fact, he admits he does *not* know who attached this license
to the afio code. The claim that the work is covered by this license may be
an unfounded assertion, but so is any claim that this is an invalid license.
If specific evidence comes to light that permission was *not* granted by the
copyright holder to place the work under the Artistic License, then we
should treat this as an RC bug. But unless that happens, there's nothing
here that makes the package ineligible for inclusion in main, AFAICS.
So downgrading the bug severity is the correct course of action here for
that reason.
There's also enough cause for doubt here that it's warranted to continue
investigating so we can be sure about the real license status; hence the bug
should not be closed outright, IMHO.
(The lenny-ignore tag is also left in place, reflecting the release team's
intent to not treat this as a blocker for lenny if there were a reason to
re-raise the severity.)
Cheers,
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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