Re: Please advise regarding DFSG compliance of WPL-2

[Giacomo Tesio <giacomo@tesio.it>]

On Mon, 18 Feb 2019 at 16:20, Joerg Jaspert <joerg@debian.org> wrote:
>
> On 15317 March 1977, Giacomo Tesio wrote:
>
> >> None of the ftpteam, to my knowledge, is able to read and understand the
> >> arabic version, and this english translation is saying its worth
> >> nothing.
> > This sound like a severe cultural limitation though, affecting all
> > non-english developers and users.
> > Can any mitigation be put in place?
>
> Best: Someone (read: License author) could publish a translation that is not
> saying "I'm rubbish".

Are you sure that it's entirely possible?

It's not always possible to perform a lossless translation between two
human languages, and I'm not sure if having two not perfectly
equivalent licenses is such a best practice.

LiLiQ licenses, for example, are written in French and the English
translation is NOT authoritative

https://opensource.org/licenses/LiLiQ-P-1.1
https://opensource.org/licenses/LiLiQ-R-1.1
https://opensource.org/licenses/LiLiQ-Rplus-1.1

Also, legislation varies both in times and places anyway so this
policy might just be unfair (if not discriminatory) for people outside
the US sphere of influence.
It's not just Arabic: what about licenses in Russian, in Chinese or Kiswahili?

Maybe Debian doesn't have the human resources to be "fair" in this regards.
But if licenses in Debian must have their authoritative text in
English, shouldn't it be noted somewhere in the DFSG?


Giacomo