On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 12:00:44PM +0100, Florent Bayle wrote: > Hello, > > At http://www.vanheusden.com/unsort/ you can find a piece of software called > "unsort", which contains a file named "licence.txt" with the following > contents : > > "The license of this program can be obtained from: > http://www.vanheusden.com/license.txt > It is actually the GNU Public License." > > How could this be interpreted ? Does this means that the licence depends of > the content of "http://www.vanheusden.com/license.txt";, does that mean that > the licence of this piece of software can change at any time (even for the > same release) ? Is it possible to include it in Debian ? > > My personal feeling is that we shouldn't include it in Debian "as is", > because > we can't be sure that the licence would remain the same over the time, and > thus we couldn't guarantee that it will always remains free. My understanding is that once something is released under such a free license, its not possible to unrelease it. Someone who hypothetically gave me to right to modify+distribute their work can't well pretend to be able to undo that.
In practice, I think its probably fine to deal with software that might do this, but, as always, its a bad position to make enemies, especially with the guy who's software you're using/packaging. It would be nice to have healthy communication with the upstream author, and would also be good to be able to demonstrate that, at one point, the contents of /licenese.txt was actually the GPL. Ideally, the source files would have the GPL header and disclaimer, or at least something to the effect of "# This file is copyright (C) 2005 Justin Pryzby and released under the terms of the GPLv2 license". You might start by bringing this up with the author(s). -- Clear skies, Justin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
