Re: Maxmind GeoIP/Geolite license change
On Sat, 04 Jan 2020 at 03:08:29 +0100, Patrick Matthäi wrote:
> Am 04.01.2020 um 01:53 schrieb Faidon Liambotis:
> > the libraries are free-libre, the file format
> > is open and freely documented (CC-BY-SA 3.0), and there are both readers
> > and writers for those formats in the archive. There are even
> > free-as-in-beer databases available in the wild, although that wouldn't
> > even be a requirement IMO. There is nothing in the DFSG that says that
> > software is free-libre only if it operates on publicly available
> > free-libre data.
>
> We have got many similar examples in another category: games
> Old games like Quake, Red Alert, Roaler Coaster Tycoon etc etc, the game
> code now itself is free: sometimes reverse engin., new code or open
> sourced by the publisher itself. But often the required game data
> (images, videos, etc) are not distributable and required from the
> original cd-rom.
>
> So the game code itself is free, but we have to put it in contrib,
> because it is only useable with non-free data.
That's only the case for game engines that are particularly tightly
coupled to a particular game or games, like yquake2 for Quake II and
openjk for Jedi Knight II and Jedi Academy.
Many game engines are in main, not in contrib, because Free data in a
compatible format exists or would be feasible to provide. We don't require
that the game data is conveniently packaged in Debian, or even that it's
sufficiently complete to be a worthwhile game in its own right, only that
it's possible (and even that rule might be more conservative than it needs
to be). For example, quakespasm is mostly a Quake 1 engine, and we don't
have any Quake-1-compatible data in the archive; but it's in main anyway,
because it can also be used to play Quake-like games such as OpenQuartz
(analogous to OpenArena, but a lot less complete, and for Quake 1).
Similarly, darkplaces (another Quake 1 engine) and ioquake3 (a
Quake III Arena engine) would be OK for main even if nexuiz and
openarena were removed from Debian.
The .desktop file, etc. for Quake 1 *are* in contrib, because they're
for Quake 1 specifically, not just "a Quake-like game".
Packages in main also include viewers and editors for specific file
formats like aylet and cpmtools (without requiring examples of those
file formats to exist in Debian main), clients for specific websites
and web-APIs like lgogdownloader, youtube-dl and git-hub (the websites
are obviously outside the scope of Debian), emulators for specific
computers like aranym and cen64 (without requiring those computers'
operating systems to exist in Debian), and email clients that are used
to read non-Free emails like this one.
If in doubt about the boundaries of main vs. contrib, talk to the ftp
team, which is the team that makes the actual decisions about where the
line is drawn. If I remember correctly, the games team consulted the
ftp team before we uploaded quakespasm, to confirm that it would be
considered acceptable for main.
smcv
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