Re: Bug#227793: pgeasy has no copyright
Hi Steve, hi d-legal! On 2004-03-08 12:59 -0600, Steve Langasek wrote: [CC:ed to debian-legal, for sanity checking] Sounds reasonable ;-) If the website is down, how would anyone be able to verify that your .orig.tar.gz is pristine source, either? I guess only by comparing it to the tarballs on some mirrors. But you are right, this may become legally difficult as well. Therefore, I strongly recommend that you update debian/copyright to reflect the actual license of this work, regardless of whether that license is currently included in the tarball, and close the RC bug accordingly. If that would be conform to Policy 2.3, I can do that. Currently debian/copyright already says that the license is BSD, so I will add an URL to the web page which declares that. However, Bruce just replied yesterday that he will prepare an updated version anyway (I sent him a new build system and other minor stuff), so I hope that this resolves cleanly anyway. When the current postgresql finally goes into sarge (I will make an updated upload today or tomorrow), it will be possible to remove pgeasy. I pinged its upstream author (who promised to change that weeks ago) and will do it again, but in the light of the upcoming freeze I will ask for removing pgeasy if upstream does not release an update. Would you agree to this? I don't understand this. Currently, the pgeasy source package *only* exists in unstable. If you want to remove pgeasy, why would this need to wait for a new postgresql package in testing? This is a bit complicated. The binary package pgeasy does exist in testing, but up to postgresql-7.4.1-1 it was built out out postgresql's source tree; its source package amalgated four upstream tarballs since there had been a time when these packages could be built only in the postgresql sources. Then I created new build systems for these auxilliary packages to give them proper source packages. So ATM pgeasy cannot be removed from testing without removing postgresql as well, because testing still has postgresql-7.3.x. And is this trivially-solvable RC bug your only reason for requesting removal? Yes since it is (or rather, I thought it was) RC and in this case only upstream can change that. But as already said, I hope to get a new upstream package soon. If not, I will downgrade the RC bug to important, if d-legal agrees. Any comments? Thank you and have a nice day! Martin -- Martin Pitt Debian GNU/Linux Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.piware.de http://www.debian.org signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: DRAFT summary of the OPL; feedback requested
Don Armstrong wrote: It is defined somewhere. See http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html question 8. Do you think we should perhaps try to get a link from http://www.debian.org/devel to this (and perhaps the various other documents which have been assembled, such as Manoj's huge page on the GFDL problems)? It comes up a lot. -- Nathanael Nerode neroden at gcc.gnu.org US citizens: if you're considering voting for Bush, look at these first: http://www.misleader.org/ http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/arar/ http://www.house.gov/reform/min/politicsandscience/
Re: Ada Community License - DFSG
Mahesh T. Pai wrote: Arvind Autar said on Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 09:41:36PM +0100,: library is licensed under the Ada Community License. I already found a thread which talks about whether it's allowed or not. That thread is not clear to me. The Ada Community License, taken from:- http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200207/msg00744.html Seems to contradict itself in some aspects, and vague in others. Tha thread seems inconclusive. Walter Landry started off thinking it is DFSG free, but later agreed that some ambiguities are there. I'm unsure whether it's DFSG-free -- but it's certainly poorly drafted. Perhaps the author could be asked what he meant and why he isn't using the Clarified Artistic License? beginquote The Ada Community License Copyright(C) 1997 David G. Weller Permission to redistribute in unmodified form is granted, all other rights reserved. This appears to contradict the license below. But I'll assume it doesn't for now... This is a modification of the Perl Artistic License, (c)1989-1991, Larry Wall Preamble The intent of this document is to state the conditions under which the Ada library may be copied, such that the Copyright Holder maintains some semblance of artistic control over its development, while giving Ada users the right to use and distribute the Ada library in a more-or-less customary fashion, plus the right to make reasonable modifications. Definitions: Refers to the collection of Ada source files distributed by the Library Copyright Holder, and derivatives of that collection of files created through textual modification. Refers to such a library if it has Standard Version not been modified, or has been modified as specified below. Copyright Holder Is whoever is named in the copyright or copyrights for the Ada library. You Is you, if you're thinking about copying or distributing this library. Is whatever you can justify on the basis of media cost, duplication charges, time of people involved, and Reasonable Copying so on. (You will not be required to Fee justify it to the Copyright Holder, but only to the computing community at large as a market that must bear the fee.) Means that no fee is charged for the item itself, though there may be fees Freely Available involved in handling the item. It also means that recipients of the item may redistribute it under the same conditions they received it. Provisions: 1 You may make and give away verbatim copies of the source form of the Standard Version of this Ada library without restriction, provided that you duplicate all of the original copyright notices and associated disclaimers. That's fine. 2 You may apply bug fixes, portability fixes and other modifications derived from the Public Domain or from the Copyright Holder. A library modified in such a way shall still be considered the Standard Version. The difference from the Clarified Artistic License is that this does *not* include modifications which are Freely Available. In other words, any modifications you make must be given to the public domain in order for this clause to apply to modified versions. Is that an acceptable requirement? I think it actually may be an acceptable requirement, and so it may be DFSG-free under this clause -- provided it is possible to assign works to the public domain in your jurisdiction. :-P 3 You may otherwise modify your copy of this Ada library in any way, provided that you insert a prominent notice in each changed file stating how and when you changed that file, and provided that you do at least ONE of the following: a) Place your modifications in the Public Domain or
Re: Debian Legal summary of the X-Oz License
posted mailed selussos wrote: That possibly could be your own _personal_ prejudice which is understandable but I think that U.S. Copyright is fairly well deployed throughout this world and is internationally recognized. Perhaps you might not understand the way international copyright works; I will explain it just in case. The way international copyright works is this: if I have a US copyright, I am treated as having a UK copyright in the UK, an Argentine copyright in Argentina, a French copyright in France, etc. All these different copyrights expire at the different times (according to local law), and most importantly, fair use/fair dealing provisions are entirely different in each country. Debian needs a license which will make the licensed software free in essentially all countries. (See for instance that Debian is excluding certain software currently which is the subject of an aggressively enforced patent in Canada; the patent has expired everywhere else, but Debian is worldwide.) So we can't rely on aspects of US copyright law which are not widely accepted, unfortunately -- and fair use is one of those elements which isn't widely accepted. -- Nathanael Nerode neroden at gcc.gnu.org US citizens: if you're considering voting for Bush, look at these first: http://www.misleader.org/ http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/arar/ http://www.house.gov/reform/min/politicsandscience/
Re: Debian Legal summary of the X-Oz License
I'm going to try to be clear about where debian-legal is coming from. We've gotten a lot more careful about licenses in recent years after being burned several times by surprising license interpretations. And by people trying to do odd, non-free things with their copyright licenses (usually people trying to create pseudo-trademarks in a copyright license -- I don't know why that's so popular). MJ Ray wrote: Could you please look at the X.org and X-Oz licences again and notice this difference? If you want to mimic the X.org licence, then will you make that clause a notice in the footer instead, please? Copyright licence conditions are the wrong way to police trademarks. To be clear, what he means by this is that trademarks and copyrights are quite separate and different things. We are all for trademark enforcement. However, putting conditions about trademarks in copyright licenses often ends up restricting legitimate activity -- and it's never, ever necessary, since a copyright license simply doesn't grant *any* trademark-related rights. Except as contained in this notice, the name of X-Oz Technologies shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization from X-Oz Technologies. We're basically afraid of nasty interpretations of this -- we try to respect the copyright holders' interpretation, and some have had unexpectedly nasty interpretations of seemingly nice licenses (ask about the University of Washington and Pine). Basically, under the law of pretty much every country we've ever heard of, these rights are guaranteed already -- nobody can use your name for promotional purposes without prior written authorization regardless -- so if it's just reasserting those rights, this clause is meaningless. However, under a strict interpretation of the license, it could mean that if someone (illegally) used the name X-Oz Technologies to promote their variant of the software, they would be violating the copyright license, and would then lose the right to create modified versions of the software entirely -- and then the innocent people who got the modified versions could suddenly have illegal, undistributable programs. Or, indeed, under a strict interpretation, if I happened to mention the name X-Oz Technologies while I was promoting the software, even if not in a promotional manner, that could be interpreted as violating the copyright license, etc. Given that the clause is otherwise meaningless, we have to wonder whether one of these stricter interpretations is intended. So when a copyright holder puts this in a license, we have to ask them, Is this clause meaningless, or do you mean something stronger than what's guaranteed by law? If they say it's meaningless, that's great and we can stop worrying about it -- though we ask them to please remove it because of its meaninglessness. :-) If they say it means something stronger, then we need to know what exactly they mean. The end-user documentation included with the redistribution, if any, must include the following acknowledgment: This product includes software developed by X-Oz Technologies (http://www.x-oz.com/). Alternately, this acknowledgment may appear in the software itself, if and wherever such third-party acknowledgments normally appear. Again, we're worried about nasty interpretations -- we have to ask the copyright holders. A strict interpretation might require all kinds of crazy things, like including the acknowledgement line in documentation I wrote myself for another program, simply becase it was end-user documentation and was redistributed along with the X-Oz software. We need reassurance from the copyright holders. There was a similar clause in the Apache 1.1 license; however, the Apache copyright holders made it *very* clear that they intended this to be a *very* weak requirement, so we concluded that it was free. It may, however, be GPL-incompatible (i.e. you can't make a program which is derived from both a GPL-licensed program and an Apache-1.1-licensed program), because it imposes a very strict, specific condition which is not in the GPL. This has been argued about, but Debian had to be conservative and assumed that it wasn't GPL-compatible. For Apache that wasn't a serious problem (although Apache has actually been revising their license with the stated intent of making it definitely GPL-compatible). For XFree86 this *is* a problem, because there's a very large number of GPL-licensed programs linked with XFree86, using XFree86 header files, etc., which makes them derivative works of XFree86 (at least in the view of some of the copyright holders of the GPL-licensed programs, whose views we try to respect). So new XFree86 with this new clause might not be legally usable with a lot of programs which are already part of Debian. So we would want a definite statement from the copyright holder that it was intended to be
Tracking -legal decisions [Was: Re: DRAFT summary of the OPL; feedback requested]
On Tue, 09 Mar 2004, Nathanael Nerode wrote: Don Armstrong wrote: It is defined somewhere. See http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html question 8. Do you think we should perhaps try to get a link from http://www.debian.org/devel to this (and perhaps the various other documents which have been assembled, such as Manoj's huge page on the GFDL problems)? It comes up a lot. Yeah, what would probably be best is to setup a http://www.debian.org/licenses or http://www.debian.org/legal/ to both archive our license decisions and provide a place to stick the FAQ and links to relevant decisions|commentary. Then link to it from the appropriate places in the Developer's Reference, http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines and wherever else seems appropriate. I've been meaning to take a closer look at doing this soon, but unfortunatly, my research has been eating up what little time I possess. Don Armstrong -- A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election. -- Bill Vaughan http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
Re: Adding modified autoconf macro to a QPLed tree
posted mailed Siggy Brentrup wrote: [Please Cc me on replies since I'm not subscribed to d-legal] Hi, I'm adopting the spamprobe package which is under the QPL (Qt public license). The package has a broken configure.in script that results in linking against libdb3.so even when libdb4.2-dev is installed. The previous maintainer solved this by build-depending on libdb3-dev, while I prefer to fix configure.in. IMHO the proper solution is to modify autoconf's AC_SEARCH_LIBS macro and put the result into acinclude.m4 in the source tree. Since autoconf macros are GPLed with a special exception for generated output, this holds for my modified version too. v special exception from /usr/share/autoconf/autoconf/libs.m4 v # As a special exception, the Free Software Foundation gives unlimited # permission to copy, distribute and modify the configure scripts that # are the output of Autoconf. You need not follow the terms of the GNU # General Public License when using or distributing such scripts, even # though portions of the text of Autoconf appear in them. The GNU # General Public License (GPL) does govern all other use of the material # that constitutes the Autoconf program. # # Certain portions of the Autoconf source text are designed to be copied # (in certain cases, depending on the input) into the output of # Autoconf. We call these the data portions. The rest of the Autoconf # source text consists of comments plus executable code that decides which # of the data portions to output in any given case. We call these # comments and executable code the non-data portions. Autoconf never # copies any of the non-data portions into its output. # # This special exception to the GPL applies to versions of Autoconf # released by the Free Software Foundation. When you make and # distribute a modified version of Autoconf, you may extend this special # exception to the GPL to apply to your modified version as well, *unless* # your modified version has the potential to copy into its output some # of the text that was the non-data portion of the version that you # started # with. (In other words, unless your change moves or copies text from # the non-data portions to the data portions.) If your modification has # such potential, you must delete any notice of this special exception # to the GPL from your modified version. ^ special exception from /usr/share/autoconf/autoconf/libs.m4 ^ Now my question is: are there any legal problems in offering upstream the modified macro for inclusion in his source tree, which is QPLed? *sigh* Messy. This is how it has to work. Your derivative version of the AC_SEARCH_LIBS macro must be licensed under the GPL. It can (and should) include the special exception. It should probably go in its own file if it's the only GPLed macro in the source tree -- you can use sinclude(my_file) in acinclude.m4 to use it. It cannot be QPLed, but it should not affect the rest of the source tree. The upstream author will probably have to note that that one file is not QPLed. ;-) The generated configure script then can be under whatever license (such as the QPL), because of the special exception. I *think* this is sufficient, but perhaps the rest of debian-legal should chime in. :-/ Thanks . Siggy However, from my autoconf experience ;-) you really shouldn't have to make a modified version of AC_SEARCH_LIBS if you write the configure.in correctly -- there should be another way to do that...
Re: Tracking -legal decisions [Was: Re: DRAFT summary of the OPL; feedback requested]
* Don Armstrong ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [040309 16:40]: Yeah, what would probably be best is to setup a http://www.debian.org/licenses or http://www.debian.org/legal/ to both archive our license decisions and provide a place to stick the FAQ and links to relevant decisions|commentary. licenses.debian.org? I've been meaning to take a closer look at doing this soon, but unfortunatly, my research has been eating up what little time I possess. Well, I can try to invest a little bit time into this. Thank you for your work. Cheers, Andi -- http://home.arcor.de/andreas-barth/ PGP 1024/89FB5CE5 DC F1 85 6D A6 45 9C 0F 3B BE F1 D0 C5 D1 D9 0C
Re: Ada Community License - DFSG
Nathanael Nerode wrote: Mahesh T. Pai wrote: The Ada Community License Copyright(C) 1997 David G. Weller Permission to redistribute in unmodified form is granted, all other rights reserved. This appears to contradict the license below. But I'll assume it doesn't for now... I think this refers to the license itself, not the software covered by it, much like the GPL's Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.. - Josh Triplett
Re: Ada Community License - DFSG
On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 08:59:52AM -0500, Nathanael Nerode wrote: Mahesh T. Pai wrote: d) Make other distribution arrangements with the Copyright Holder. Not useful for Debian unless we do so. ;-) You and I both know that Debian cannot make local distribution arrangements with the Copyright Holder in order to free the work. Everyone needs to have the right to use the work as free software. Simon
Re: Ada Community License - DFSG
On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 07:26:01PM -0500, Simon Law wrote: On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 08:59:52AM -0500, Nathanael Nerode wrote: Mahesh T. Pai wrote: d) Make other distribution arrangements with the Copyright Holder. Not useful for Debian unless we do so. ;-) You and I both know that Debian cannot make local distribution arrangements with the Copyright Holder in order to free the work. Everyone needs to have the right to use the work as free software. Who says the arrangement made has to be Debian-specific? We might arrange with the copyright holder to release the software under the GPL. Although Debian may have been the instigators of the arrangement, if everyone else can benefit then there's no DFSG problem. I do, of course, understand the point you were trying to make, and it needed to be made. But it wouldn't be d-legal without pedantry. g - Matt
