Re: GPL3 compatible?
Hi Charles, Charles Plessy wrote: it looks like you are discussing the file rtengine/cubic.cc in RawTherapee: http://code.google.com/p/rawtherapee/source/browse/trunk/rtengine/cubic.cc correct I will answer to your last question first. If the RawTherapee authors obtained the agreement of Ken Turkowski to relicense his work, then there is no problem to have it licensed under the GPL and the above custom license. The GPL gives I would expect some kind of notice about the re-licensing agreement, though. the freedoms that are necessary for Debian and are not explicitely written in the original license, and the original license does not withdraw freedoms given by the GPL. If you have doubts that the relicensing was permitted, then it is better to contact both parties before proposing a RawTherapee package to Debian. The original license cubic.cc is vague by todays standards, and it would be preferable to check with the original author that he really meant that he does not want his source code to be modified. rtengine/cubic.cc is not very long and implements an algebra forumla that was discovered centuries ago. If it is confirmed that there are license issues, for instance if the original author is not reachable, then replacing the file can be the easiest solution to the problem. True. Thanks! Best, Ludovico signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Vagueness of what is ‘substantial’ in the Expat license.
On Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:03:12 +1100 Ben Finney wrote: Charles Plessy ple...@debian.org writes: I would like to make a small comment about the “Expat” license, that personally I would not recommend when proposing a relicensing, because of the following sentence: ‘The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.’ It is not easy to guess what each author will expect to be “substantial”. I would expect that to be determined by what is substantial for copyright law (i.e. whether the portion is substantial enough for copyright to obtain) in any given jurisdiction. I've always interpreted the Expat license this way. I cannot think of any other reasonable interpretation: maybe it's just lack of fantasy on my side... Your point is well made, though, that it is ambiguous as written. I don't think the Expat license is ambiguous: I find the above-quoted sentence pretty clear, instead. -- http://www.inventati.org/frx/progs/scripts/pdebuild-hooks.html Need some pdebuild hook scripts? . Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == C979 F34B 27CE 5CD8 DC12 31B5 78F4 279B DD6D FCF4 pgpGv92RZoC4T.pgp Description: PGP signature
debhelper and GPL
Hello, While conducting routine reading, I saw that debhelper is released under the GPL license. Since debhelper includes bits of itself in the package it manages, does this mean that I cannot use debhelper for packaging something that would be GPL-incompatible? I know that for fonts, one has to make exceptions stating that PDF documents embedding GPL fonts are not covered by the GPL, why should it be different for debhelper? Sincerly, -- Jean-Christophe Dubacq -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4ba6096f.7020...@free.fr
Re: debhelper and GPL
On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 12:56:31 +0100, Jean-Christophe Dubacq wrote: Hello, While conducting routine reading, I saw that debhelper is released under the GPL license. Since debhelper includes bits of itself in the package it manages, does this mean that I cannot use debhelper for packaging something that would be GPL-incompatible? I know that for fonts, one has to make exceptions stating that PDF documents embedding GPL fonts are not covered by the GPL, why should it be different for debhelper? Files: examples/*, autoscripts/* Copyright: 1997-2008 Joey Hess jo...@debian.org Licence: other These files are in the public domain. . Pedants who belive I cannot legally say that code I have written is in the public domain may consider them instead to be licensed as follows: . Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted under any circumstances. No warranty. What other bits of debhelper are you talking about? Cheers, Julien signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: debhelper and GPL
Jean-Christophe Dubacq jcduba...@free.fr writes: While conducting routine reading, I saw that debhelper is released under the GPL license. Since debhelper includes bits of itself in the package it manages, does this mean that I cannot use debhelper for packaging something that would be GPL-incompatible? License compatibility for two distinct works matters only when considering a work that would need to satisfy the terms of both licenses. Under US copyright jurisdiction, this would matter when one work is considered a “derived work” of the other; similar concepts occur in other jurisdictions AFAIK. I know that for fonts, one has to make exceptions stating that PDF documents embedding GPL fonts are not covered by the GPL, why should it be different for debhelper? For a PDF document that contains fonts, it seems clear to me that the PDF document is a derived work of the fonts, since it builds a new work that isn't meaningfully separable from the fonts. That's why in that case the compatibility of the license terms is important. In the case of debhelper's generated files, the files that come from ‘examples/’ and ‘autoscripts/’ are explicitly placed in the public domain as specified in the copyright file for ‘debhelper’. Are there other parts that concern this question? -- \ “Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done | `\for me?” —Groucho Marx | _o__) | Ben Finney -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87fx3tu7hp@benfinney.id.au
