Sebastiaan Couwenberg <sebas...@xs4all.nl> wrote: > Because I've been unable to get feedback from Thorsten Alteholz or any > of the other FTP masters about this issue, I'm now directing this to > debian-legal in the hope we can get a dialog going between the Debian > project and the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium). I'm getting the > impression that the FTP masters are unwilling to discuss this issue > because it might constitute legal advise which is problematic in the US, > or because they only enforce the DFSG and not set the terms of its > interpretation.
debian-legal does not dispense official Debian advice. It is just a bunch of people with experience in how Debian looks at legal issues. So we can not give you an sort of official advice. This applies even to this email. I am not empowered to give official Debian advice. With that said, the people behind ftp-master are very busy and do not have time for lengthy discussions of legal minutiae. They rely on discussions in debian-legal to sort out the issues and fix obvious problems. So in this kind of situation, the usual procedure is to convince debian-legal that you have fixed the license. Then software with that new license get's submitted. ftp-master then decides whether they like the end result. This has the unfortunate possibility that ftp-master may disagree with debian-legal. In practice, debian-legal has been more conservative than ftp-master. So if you get it through debian-legal, it should be fine with ftp-master. As for the specifics of this license, the original rejection for TinyOWS http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-January/017300.html is, I think, clear about what the problem is. You have to allow modifications. Thorsten's further rejection at http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-January/017321.html also mentions the ability to freely modify. The "Proposed Text" at http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OGC_XML_Schemas_and_FOSS4G_Software_Distribution might work, but only if it is a request, not a binding requirement. That is not clear to me. Cheers, Walter Landry wlan...@caltech.edu