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Re: tomboy-ng package with non standard license.



On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 7:24 AM David Bannon wrote:

> OK folks, reminding Paul, Daniel, Tobias and Philipp of the discussion
> that took place over the last couple of months about getting tomboy-ng
> into the Debian repos.  The issue at that stage was that, of necessity,
> the source package contains some third party code called KControls, the
> license of which was deemed to be unsuitable for Debian.

I'd like to hear more about what "of necessity" means.

I assume it is related to the comment on the static linking wiki page
about FreePascal. Normally I would assume that static linking doesn't
mean embedded code copies, but perhaps it also means that FreePascal
doesn't support the concept of static libraries like C does (.a
files)? In that case, the solution would be something like what the
Rust/Golang packages in Debian do, .deb packages that contain source
code, which other packages can then build-dep on and use the source
code from.

https://wiki.debian.org/StaticLinking#FreePascal

OTOH, from my research it seems like FreePascal supports writing a
dynamic library in Pascal and loading it from a Pascal or non-Pascal
programs at runtime.

https://wiki.freepascal.org/macOS_Dynamic_Libraries
https://wiki.freepascal.org/shared_library

> TK has completely changed the license to now be the BSD 3-Clause Clear
> License. All (relevant) files are so marked.  I have changed the license
> of my code to match (to simplify things).

Excellent outcome, thanks for all your work on this.

> source/libnotify.pas (bindings to libnotify) is GPL2, thats documented
> in debian/copyright, this is, I believe a non-issue.

Correct.

> source/spelling.pas, has some code that is, again, pascal libary
> bindings, this time to hunspell. This code has been pasted in several
> forums etc, over a number of years without attribution. As such, I
> consider it public domain. It makes up only a small part of the file. I
> have therefore stamped that file too as BSD Clear.

As far as I know the public domain doesn't work this way. Code that is
floating around is still under copyright (since that lasts a long time
by default), people are just ignoring that fact and pretending they
are allowed to use it. In some jurisdictions it is possible to
explicitly release code into the public domain but in many that isn't
possible. The CC0 license was created as a way to release things into
the public domain where possible and give a very permissive license
where that is not possible.

https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0

Which part of the file are you talking about here?

-- 
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise


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