On Tue, 2005-11-22 at 12:59 +0100, Stefan Fritsch wrote: > There is also a possible license problem (a weird interpretation of GPL > on the upstream homepage). But maybe this can be ignored for the moment to > get rid of libdb4.1. Let's take a look... Jeroen van Wolffelaar <jeroen@wolffelaar.nl> writes: > - [6]Copyright © 1999-2000, [7]Tele Danmark InterNordia > + [6]Copyright © 1999-2000, [7]ElTele Øst AS > > (etc etc) > > already present in the unstable version of this package, but no documentation > whatsoever about why this change (for example, in debian/copyright). Other > than that, your package looks ok and I would've uploaded it now if it were not > for this weird thing that I'd like to see clarified. I've verified through some searching around on the official website of TDC (the new name of Tele Danmark InterNordia) that ElTele Øst is indeed a subsidary of TDC. Hence this copyright change is perfectly legal, it's not actually a change of the copyright holder but just of a name that in the end points to the same legal entity (TDC). This has also been deduced by Stefan through a whois on the eltele.no domain. Another thing brought up by Stefan Fritsch <sf@sfritsch.de>: > Another interesting point I just found is this interpretation of GPL > with respect to commercial usage [3]: "You may not sell or use > squidGuard in a commercial software package without a written > agreement with ElTele Øst AS; and most likely with Sleepycat too for > the DB part." I don't know what to make of it, especially since it is > not in the tarball. This interpretation by upstream is of course wrong. I assert though that the package can be part of Debian because of the following considerations: - The misinterpretation is in something that's marked as a summary and which refers to the GPL as the full licence statement. If those two disagree, the full licence statement prevails. - The tarball itself contains only the GPL and not this summary so it's clear that the tarball we're using is in fact GPL-licenced. - If the intent of the authors is to change the copyright of the package to require permission for commercial use, they can change the licence, but that wouldn't affect the current version we're packaging. Either the authors have made a mistake in the summary, and you might be so kind to notify them, or they want another licence, in that case that doesn't apply to the Debian package at hand. Concluding, I don't think there's anything left that should hold back uploading this NMU. regards, Thijs
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