On Sun, 2002-08-04 at 12:47, Steve Langasek wrote: > On Sun, Aug 04, 2002 at 05:58:19PM +0200, Ralf Treinen wrote: > > When I sent my ITP on debian-devel today, Moshe Zadka claimed that > > even distributing maria-viz would be illegal. > > > http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/debian-devel-200208/msg00188.html > > > Can please someone advise whether this is really the case? > > It is ok to redistribute it by itself; if you distribute it with the > interpreter (which is the case in Debian), I believe the GPL requires you > to also distribute the interpreter's source under the GPL. Therefore, if > the interpreter is not GPL-compatible, the letter of the GPL says you > cannot distribute this script in Debian.
Forgive my ignorance, but is this the general policy for GPL packages in contrib that depend on packages in non-free? It's been often quoted that "contrib and non-free are not part of Debian"; I'm wondering if this determination has an effect on the licensing question. The idea in my head is that contrib and non-free are "separate". Of course, if you create a contrib/non-free CD, you might have problems, but I thought that Debian didn't make any guarantees about third-party distribution of non-free. > However, you can do so easily if you get an exemption from the author > saying it's ok to distribute it with the "lefty" interpreter in spite of > the interpreter's license. Legally, this is the least ambiguous > solution, so I recommend seeking this license exception from the author > to prevent future objections. I can't argue with this logic, no matter the conclusion of my previous question.
