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Re: MIT + explicit "Don't sell this code." - DFSG compliant?



Given the usual disclaimers that I barely speak for myself, let alone anyone else, that I'm not a member of the Debian and my opinion is worth precisely what an anonymous voice on a mailing list says...

The usual recommendations are to pick a standard OSI compliant license and not customise it. Using a standard license makes life easier for users because they don't have to think about the implications --- everyone already knows what BSD licenses, GPL licenses etc mean. My usual analogy is to suggest thinking about it like an API. https://choosealicense.com/ is a good resource here and gives reasonable advice.

I'd suggest that if the author is concerned about people using their work commercially, then the author should look at the LGPL: this will make it easy to for users to use the library in another program, but will require that if the user modifies it or base work on it, they have to distribute the modified source.

On Tue, 1 Mar 2022 at 14:35, Fab Stz <fabstz-it@yahoo.fr> wrote:
Thank you David for your answer.

The author asked me what he could do to be DFSG compliant.

I pointed him to this mailing list, to the wikipedia & wiki.debian.net page on
DFSG. Any other suggestion?

Regards


Le lundi 28 février 2022, 15:23:28 CET David Given a écrit :
> I believe this is equivalent to the 'no commercial use' clause which
> violates guideline 6 ('no discrimination against fields of endeavor, like
> commercial use'). Apart from anything else, inclusion would mean that
> Debian wouldn't be able to sell DVDs with this package in it.
>
> On Mon, 28 Feb 2022 at 15:00, Fab Stz <fabstz-it@yahoo.fr> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I am wondering if something like this is fit to enter Debian:
> >
> > There is a web tool written in PHP that I try to package for Debian.
> > I would like to use Tagify in that project by adding the minified js.
> >
> > Now the thing is that officially the project is licensed under MIT with a
> > MIT
> > license file at the root of the project directory
> > .
> > However when looking at the header of the distributed files, there is this
> >
> > /**
> >
> >  * Tagify (v 4.9.8) - tags input component
> >  * By Yair Even-Or
> >  * Don't sell this code. (c)
> >  * https://github.com/yairEO/tagify
> >  */
> >
> > So, no mention of MIT and only mention of Don't sell this code.
> >
> > I filed an issue [2] upstream about this inconsistency.
> >
> > Could this actually enter a Debian package?
> >
> > I'm wondering because of the JSON no evil [3] case.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Fab
> >
> >
> > [1]: https://github.com/yairEO/tagify
> > [2]: https://github.com/yairEO/tagify/issues/996
> > [3]: https://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/jsonevil





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