Re: DFSG violations in Lenny: new proposal
Stephen Gran <sgran@debian.org> writes:
> This one time, at band camp, Russ Allbery said:
>> I think it's fairly obvious that glibc meets the DFSG in practice, in
>> that no one is ever going to attempt to apply the ambiguous and
>> badly-written portions of the Sun RPC license in a way that might
>> violate the DFSG. It's certainly not an ideal situation, but on the
>> spectrum of licensing issues that we might ignore it's not one that
>> would keep me up at night.
>
> I'm personally not worried about the firmware issue, either, or at least
> for the ones where the vendors intent is clear, even though the 'source'
> (whatever that is or was) is missing. Unredistributable object code is
> unredistributable, and I don't think that's in question here.
>
> But maybe I'm misreading you - are you saying that you think it's also
> fine for those bits of blobs, since the vendors pretty clearly wanted
> them to be included in free projects?
No, I'm saying that the Sun RPC code is a full source code release under a
BSD-style license. That the license is written poorly and buggily is not,
in practice, much of an issue, since no one is going to enforce it in a
non-free-software way.
The situation is not at all comparable to firmware that doesn't include
source code. My point was not to say anything about firmware, simply to
point out that the two cases are very different and one cannot easily
reason about one from the other.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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