Re: Establishing dialogue between the Debian project and OGC regarding Document & Software Notice terms
On 06-12-15 20:34, Walter Landry wrote:
> Sebastiaan Couwenberg <sebastic@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> debian-legal does not dispense official Debian advice. It is just a
> bunch of people with experience in how Debian looks at legal issues.
> So we can not give you an sort of official advice. This applies even
> to this email. I am not empowered to give official Debian advice.
>
> With that said, the people behind ftp-master are very busy and do not
> have time for lengthy discussions of legal minutiae. They rely on
> discussions in debian-legal to sort out the issues and fix obvious
> problems.
Thanks for the feedback. It seems debian-legal is at least a better
venue for this discussion, although not a party that OGC can have a
dialogue with.
> So in this kind of situation, the usual procedure is to convince
> debian-legal that you have fixed the license. Then software with that
> new license get's submitted. ftp-master then decides whether they
> like the end result.
We have chicken-and-the-egg problem here, before OGC can fix the license
we need to establish a dialogue between the Debian project and OGC to
discuss the needed changes.
> As for the specifics of this license, the original rejection for TinyOWS
>
> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-January/017300.html
>
> is, I think, clear about what the problem is. You have to allow
> modifications. Thorsten's further rejection at
>
> http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-January/017321.html
>
> also mentions the ability to freely modify. The "Proposed Text" at
>
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OGC_XML_Schemas_and_FOSS4G_Software_Distribution
>
> might work, but only if it is a request, not a binding requirement.
> That is not clear to me.
In the PyCSW discussion a good argument was made about the OGC Software
Notice terms not being problematic for Debian, because its terms are
identical to the W3C licenses and we have files licensed under those
terms in main:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-November/027146.html
https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/standards/2015-February/000845.html
Are the terms of the 'W3C Software and Document Notice and License' DFSG
complaint? If so, wouldn't it be sufficient to unambiguously license the
OGC CITE tests and XSD schemas under those terms to be DFSG compliant too?
Kind Regards,
Bas
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