Re: How to deal with teTeX's and texlive's RC licensing bugs
On Thu, Sep 28, 2006 at 12:49:14PM +0200, Norbert Preining wrote:
> On Don, 28 Sep 2006, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > A statement that "the work must be DFSG-compliant to be accepted" is not the
> > same thing as saying "this tarball is distributed under license <foo>".
> > It's the latter that introduces ambiguity.
> To cite from TeX live's "COPYING CONDITIONS":
> ------
> To the best of our knowledge, all software in this distribution is
> freely redistributable (libre, that is, not necessarily gratis), within
> the Free Software Foundation's definition and Debian Free Software
> Guidelines. If you find any non-free files included, please contact us
> (references given below).
> -------
> What does this mean?
It's not a license statement, that's for sure. It's a statement that
someone *thinks* the works are all DFSG free; it is not a statement from a
licensor that the works are all distributed under a *specific* license which
is DFSG-free.
So a claim that "everything is DFSG-compliant" when, say, one of the styles
is known to be distributed under a license prohibiting modification is a
false statement, not a licensing ambiguity.
That doesn't mean texlive needs a full license audit before release, any
more than any other package does; it does mean that any license problems you
find don't get a pass for etch just because of this statement.
Cheers,
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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