Re: incompatible licenses in the debian directory
Given the lack of specific mention of a different license for debian/*
in d/copyright, I think it's fair to say that debian/* was licensed
under CPL, whether intended or not. Still, upstream has changed to
EPL, and Soeren has refused to relicense his work under EPL (and has
offered GPL-3 as an alternative). I might be able to reuse the
previous work under CPL, but I'd rather not have a scattering of files
in debian under a now-obscure license.
At this point, I've worked on one of the packages to remove all of the
previous copyrightable work, except for d/changelog which is left
under GPL-3. Unless someone corrects me, it seems mostly harmless to
leave the changelog under GPL-3.
On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 9:44 AM, Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@debian.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 01:06:27PM +0000, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
>> Paul Tagliamonte <paultag <at> debian.org> writes:
>>
>> > So, the way *I* see this is so long as the GPL code isn't being put into
>> > a combined work with anything (e.g. GPL'd patches), it *should* be OK.
>>
>> Unfortunately, GPLv3 considers build scripts (thus, d/rules plus the
>> input for the declarative dh* commands, plus d/control which is parsed
>> by some, etc.) to be part of the “complete” source code.
>>
>> This means that even the previous maintainer was unable to legally
>> upload the package with debian/* being GPLv3, unless he added an
>> exception.
>
> This is a GPL restriction. Since the upstream code isn't GPL, why are
> you using a GPL argument about build scripts? -- in theory this would apply
> to build scripts for the GPLv3'd debian/* files, but there are none that
> I know of :)
>
>> Make out of that, consequences-wise, whatever you want…
>> just saying… there have been precedences of upstream being
>> forced to relicence because they have distributed something
>> they couldn’t under the choices they made themselves.
>>
>> bye,
>> //mirabilos
>>
>>
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>
> --
> .''`. Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@debian.org>
> : :' : Proud Debian Developer
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