[Dario Rapisardi] > The issue has been discused several times. The last one was last year in > debian-legal. The thread is quite big: > > http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/04/msg00160.html
Well, I do not have time to wade through a long thread to find the current consensus. Which bring me back to my wish for a summary of the finding, documenting the problems with the current license. > Somebody suggested to include it in 'non-free', but putting Squeak > in the same repository as Java or other really proprietary software > doesn't seem fair to me. Well, I do not care much about the perceived fairness, but there are other problems with having it in non-free. (SUN Java is not in the non-free archive, btw. The license prohibits it.) Packages in non-free are not automatically built on the architectures supported by debian. The reason is that there are some non-free licenses prohibiting this, and there has been no interest in trying to classify non-free software to know which are safe to build and which are not. Another issue is security support. As far as I know, the security team do not spend time securing packages in non-free. Similar problems are with debian/contrib. These are some of the reasons I have to trying to get all the packages we use in debian-edu into debian/main. But unless the squeak license is according to the debian free software guidelines (DFSG), it does not really matter what mine (or yours) opinion on the matter is. I see quotes from the original squeak author claiming that the license should not be interpreted as written, but instead the intent of the original author should be used instead. It would be great if copyright law worked like that, but as far as I know, it does not. And until copyright law changes, we need to look at the license as it is written, and compare it to the DFSG to check if the license is according to DFSG. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
