On Mon, 11 Aug 2014, Mike Gabriel wrote:
Dear Peter Åstrand,
I am the new maintainer of FreeRDP in Debian.
Hi and thanks for giving some feedback on this topic.
I have read your bug report and will close this bug due to the following
reasons:
o the issue needs to be discussed with upstream, not in Debian...
We disagree. This issue has already been discussed in length with
upstream. It is clear that they have a different position. But in any
case: GPL covers distribution. If Debian is distributing GPL software
without the correct license tags, this would be GPL violation, regardless
of what the upstream project claim.
o if all rdesktop lines have been rewritten, then FreeRDP can be considered
as new code
(I haven't checked the actual rewritten code lines, but in general this
is how things
are seen in such cases IMHO)
No, gradually rewriting the code might not be sufficient. As
http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise27.html points out:
"Many people have reimplemented computer programs by rewriting them to
replace the source code with code of their own writing. There is no
reason to believe that this would not be a copyright infringement
...
Although there is no case law on this point, it would seem that the
only way to break the chain of infringing works is by some
extraordinary act, such as a clean room implementation."
Apache code is compatible with GPL, so the simple solution for Debian
would be to simply mark the FreeRDP package as GPL. This is what we
suggest.
Regards,
---
Peter Astrand ThinLinc Chief Developer
Cendio AB http://cendio.com
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