Re: Advice on packaging SAGE
Le Thu, May 31, 2007 at 06:42:26PM -0700, Russ Allbery a écrit :
> Charles Plessy <charles-debian-nospam@plessy.org> writes:
>
> > I see it as violating clause 6:
>
> > No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
>
> > The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a
> > specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program
> > from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
>
> I think this is an indefensible stretch. You're basically arguing that
> violating the license terms is a field of endeavor. I don't think any
> license other than public domain would survive that argument.
No problem, I am not advocating for non-inclusion of the package :)
Anyway, I use to politely request the removal or clarification of that
kind of clause when I have responsive Upstream.
> So you believe the four-clause BSD license violates the DFSG? It contains
> the clause:
>
> * 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
> * must display the following acknowledgement:
> * This product includes software developed by the University of
> * California, Berkeley and its contributors.
>
> I believe this is not the interpretation being applied by the ftpmasters,
> who are the final authorities on licenses in Debian. The four-clause BSD
> license is not a particularly good idea, but I believe it's always been
> considered DFSG-free.
I discussed about this with some Ddeveloppers, and some think that if the
four-clause BSD would be a new licence in 2007, it would be rejected.
When Debian was created, it seems that it would not have been viable to
discard all the BSD software. The relicensing of BSD happened after
Debian creation:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html
As a personal point of view, I would never pacakge a 4-clause licenced
software. It just means that the advertisement clause would be
deliberately violated in so many cases, I do not want to take that
responsibility. Actually, I prepared the primer3 Debian package, which
was relicenced upstream from 4-clause to 3-clause after my request.
Definitely, the fsf page I cite above is well written, convincing, and
contains a "University of California did so" example which has some
wheight as well.
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
http://charles.plessy.org
Wako, Saitama, Japan
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