[Francesco Poli] > However, asking for clarifications to the license author is not > necessarily helpful: the reply you obtained from L. Rosen clarifies > *his own* interpretation of one unclear clause of the AFL v3.0.
I know the distinction. But he is a lawyer with significant experience in IP and open source. He wrote a book on open source licensing. He used to serve on the board of the ASF - though eventually he resigned due to internal politics. These are credentials which I certainly do not have, and (AFAIK) neither do you. I was hoping he would say "this doesn't mean what you think it means", and explain why ... and he did. I think that is not meaningless. Also, that something is "unclear" to you or to me does not mean it is unclear in the context of the legal profession. To put it another way: there is quite a lot of disagreement out there on how to interpret various points of the GPLv2. Does this mean we should ask every copyright holder of GPLv2 software to clarify their own stance, before accepting their software into Debian? We certainly don't do that today! > I think you should get in touch with its *copyright holders*, rather > than with the author of the license they adopted. I already did - many years ago - because at the time, svn_load_dirs had no explicit license at all. Blair, the author, spent some time contacting his former employer, the copyright holder, a company named Dolby that is now owned by Sony. Eventually, they added an explicit license. I find it _very_ unlikely that they will be willing to go through all that trouble again, in order to change from one OSI-approved license to another. And not only OSI-approved, but written by a member and former board member of the ASF. I could remove svn_load_dirs again. It turned out to be somewhat disruptive last time I did that (because there was no license at all). It seems people actually use that script, though I do not. While there is a partial replacement available (svn-load by dannf, actually written _because_ of this issue, and packaged separately), I don't want to put people through the disruption of removing this again now that it's back in. That is why I now ship it in the debian subdir, as the whole 'contrib' area is no longer shipped in upstream tarballs. Peter -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
