On 2/4/25 17:41, Sam Hartman wrote:
"Simon" == Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> writes:Simon> All, Is the license below acceptable for inclusion into Simon> 'non-free'? It is claimed to cover the tarsnap software, see Simon> https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap and Simon> https://www.tarsnap.com/ for background. I think Andrew's reading is more picky than I've generally seen us be. I think that if you do not need to modify any of the files they distribute in order to package, you can make a sufficiently credible claim that you have not modified the software. The question in my mind is whether you are redistributing for the sole purpose of using their backup service. I'm not worried about the case where a user does something different: users are expected to read and comply with the licenses of non-free software they install. Debian has no plans to use their backup service. Instead, we're redistributing in order to make it easier for others to do so. I don't know whether that's the same as redistributing to use their backup service. I'd go ask them.
As far as I'm concerned (as the owner of Tarsnap Backup Inc. and the author of the license): "For the purpose of using the tarsnap backup service" doesn't say anything about who is using the backup service. And the tarsnap client is packaged up for lots of other operating systems (e.g. in the FreeBSD ports tree). Tarsnap is obviously not Free in the Debian sense but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be in the non-free repo. As Graham noted upthread, we do host our own .deb package repo -- but we only have x86 packages, so it would make me very happy to see tarsnap be included in Debian and built for other platforms as well. -- Colin Percival FreeBSD Release Engineering Lead & EC2 platform maintainer Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid
