Establishing dialogue between the Debian project and OGC regarding Document & Software Notice terms
Because I've been unable to get feedback from Thorsten Alteholz or any
of the other FTP masters about this issue, I'm now directing this to
debian-legal in the hope we can get a dialog going between the Debian
project and the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium). I'm getting the
impression that the FTP masters are unwilling to discuss this issue
because it might constitute legal advise which is problematic in the US,
or because they only enforce the DFSG and not set the terms of its
interpretation.
A recurring problem with geospatial software in the Free Software
community and Debian in particular has been the terms of the OGC
Document Notice and Software Notice licenses. The problematic OGC
license terms were first discussed with you after the rejection of
TinyOWS [0]. The discussion triggered by the rejection raised some
issues [1] that to this day cannot be resolved because we've not been
able to establish a dialogue between the Debian FTP masters and OGC.
In February 2015 the problematic OGC licenses were discussed on the
OSGeo standards list [2], because the PyCSW project and its packaging
was affected by the same issues as TinyOWS [3]. OGC followed that
discussion and wants "to do whatever possible to ensure that OGC
licensing is not a hurdle".
OGC has provided George Percivall (CC'ed) as a contact point to discuss
the OGC license terms, and I hope we can determine the appropriate
person or team in Debian to fulfil this role on the Debian side. The FTP
masters seemed the best choice initially, but their lack of feedback on
this issue make doubt they want to help resolve this issue. If
debian-legal is also not the appropriate contact in Debian, can you
suggest who would be a good contact in Debian to discuss the licensing
issues with people from OGC?
Scott Simmons (also CC'ed) informed me [4] that they never heard back
from Debian when they tried to discuss this issue. Since I directed them
to the general ftpmaster@ contact and that didn't work out, I addressed
Thorsten Alteholz personally [5] since has was the FTP master to reject
these packages and involved in the follow-up discussion. That also
didn't work out, so now I'm trying my luck with debian-legal.
[0]
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-January/017300.html
[1]
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-January/017321.html
[2] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/standards/2015-February/000834.html
[3]
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-November/024520.html
[4] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/standards/2015-November/000937.html
[5] https://lists.debian.org/debian-gis/2015/11/msg00038.html
Kind Regards,
Bas
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