FWD: Re: Debian Weekly News - November 29th, 2000
----- Forwarded message from Hein Meling <Hein.Meling@item.ntnu.no> -----
From: Hein Meling <Hein.Meling@item.ntnu.no>
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2000 23:44:35 +0100
To: Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>
Subject: Re: Debian Weekly News - November 29th, 2000
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.75 [en] (Win98; U)
Dear Joey,
I don't know if it's appropriate to direct this to you, but if you want
to you could pass it on, since I'm not on the debian-policy list.
Joey Hess wrote:
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Debian Weekly News
> http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2000/39/
> Debian Weekly News - November 29th, 2000
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
[...]
> Should every GPL'd package include the full text of the GPL? Debian
> currently ships exactly one copy of the GPL, and copyright files
> simply refer to it. However, [10]RMS has stated that "when a single
> package is distributed, it has to *come with* a copy of the GPL". It
> can be [11]argued that Debian does not distribute singleton packages,
> but rather an entire distribution which does include the full text of
> the GPL. But what about people who re-distribute a single Debian
> package? They may be technically violating the GPL. Of course bloating
> Debian with several thousand copies of the GPL should be avoided if at
> all possible, and Ben Collins has proposed an [12]extension to dpkg
> that could allow every package to contain the GPL, but only install
> one copy. This discussion is still young, so DWN will revisit it next
> week.
I suggest putting functionality into dpkg that will check if the GPL and
related files are installed on the users system, and if not downloaded
it from some convenient site(s). The GPL should not be included into
every package, which would significantly increase the size of a
download. Or the GPL could be a mandatory package on which all others
depend; not sure if that is realistic though.
Disclaimer; These opinions are my own, hereby published under GPL, free
of charge :-)
Cheers,
Hein
----- End forwarded message -----
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see shy jo
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