Re: legal aspects of packaging nagios-sap-ccms

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Ciaran Farrell <cfarrell@suse.de> writes:

> On 12/01/12 13:52, Paul Wise wrote:

> > Either [OpenSUSE] don't care about the legal issues or they have a
> > special license to distribute.
>
> The latter is correct, […]

Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> writes:

> Does that mean Debian also has permission to distribute?

Given that “that latter” is presumably referring to “OpenSUSE have a
special license to distribute”, then it's worth pointing out that (as
Paul is probably aware) Debian's guidelines for free software are
explicitly crafted to reject such special licenses.

DFSG §8 reads:

    8. License Must Not Be Specific to Debian
       The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's
       being part of a Debian system. If the program is extracted from
       Debian and used or distributed without Debian but otherwise within
       the terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program
       is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are
       granted in conjunction with the Debian system.

So, OpenSUSE's special license to this work doesn't help Debian. Only a
general license for all recipients can be used.

-- 
 \           “Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.” |
  `\                                                       —Niels Bohr |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney