Re: Is there a Debian 1.3 "Unleashed" available?
( I took out all the extra cc's on this thread. You're welcome. )
On Mon, 16 Jun 1997, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> Be very careful here. You have made the common blunder when thinking about
> non-free. It has absolutely nothing to do with money! The fact that you
> are not intending to sell the CD does not mean that you are not liable for
> infringing a copyright. The reason these packages are in this directory is
> because they have distribution restrictions. These restrictions may
> include media restrictions, distribution with other types of software
> restrictions, etc... In fact the most dangerous packages in non-free are
> the ones without any copyright notice at all. Under copyright law these
> packages are assumed to have THE most restrictive copyright possible,
> and unless you have the expressed permission of the author you may be open
> to suit for copyright infringement if you include them on your "cost free"
> CD.
I will look again. I can't seem to find the ones that are OK to put up for
anonymous ftp at multiple mirrors, but can't be placed on other media for
free. Some of the mirror sites are commercial organizations, so any
license that is restricted to educational and non-profit organizations is
violated by that.
If you read the Netscape license, you will see that all you have to do is
start a 'religious organization' and you can provide it to your 'members'.
I think that rather than start a phony church or school, it is better to
try to follow the intentions of the author. I am willing to actually lose
money because some people were very concerned that Infomagic, Walnut Creek
CD-ROM and others would get rich from the work of the poor. They have a
valid point, especially when it comes to CD-ROM's included with magazines
and books. Many of the publications are a total waste of paper. The 'free'
software makes it sell and the authors want a small royalty for that.
I suppose that if there really was a big problem here, there wouldn't be
any complete mirrors of ftp.debian.org because you would need a lawyer to
configure your mirror software. If that's the case, it would be better to
delete anything from non-free that can't be freely mirrored now. Nobody
wants to provide a mirror with such complications and nobody wants to use
a partial mirror for upgrades/installs. Try advising mirror sites to check
all the copyrights before mirroring and debian.org will need a T-3 because
there won't be anymore mirrors.
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