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Re: [PROPOSAL] Full text of GPL must be included



Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> writes:

> >>"Thomas" == Thomas Bushnell, BSG <tb@becket.net> writes:
> 
>  Thomas> However, Debian is in a different position, and the problem is that
>  Thomas> people can and do pull .debs off the Debian site and install them on
>  Thomas> other distros.  The license really does require that we give them a
>  Thomas> copy of the GPL, and that's a reasonable requirement.
> 
> 	I can pull single files off the FSF's ftp archive and not
>  download the COPYING file. Is the FSF in violation as well? We
>  seem to be in august company, then.

LOL.  Are you speaking of ftp.gnu.org?  I don't think you *can* pull
single files off that site; it only contains complete tarballs of
source.

Perhaps you're referring to the CVS servers and things like that, but
that's an odd kind of comparison.  People are told, in many and
various contexts, that an individual .deb is a good thing to have,
which they can fetch and install on many systems, including non-Debian
ones, including non-Linux ones, in fact.  

We cannot assume that *those* users have copies of the GPL, or any
knowledge about the presence of it in the "base-files" package or some
other package.  

We do tell those users that they can get a copy of the license off the
web, but that is not sufficient, and it's not an accident that it's
not sufficient.  

> 	They can read a COPYRIGHT file in the package. dpkg -L can
>  tell them. Looking into /usr/share/doc/ shall tell them. The user not
>  knowing where the copyright exists (duh -- I did not think that the
>  file called COPYING has a copyright notice -- so you are bad, bad) is
>  not really a telling argument.

That works if and only if they are on a Debian system.  They might not
be.  

Thomas



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