Bug#639916: spread: license wackiness
Package: spread Severity: serious 3. All advertising materials (including web pages) mentioning features or use of this software, or software that uses this software, must display the following acknowledgment: This product uses software developed by Spread Concepts LLC for use in the Spread toolkit. For more information about Spread see http://www.spread.org; Seriously? For -legal: consider this page: http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/spread -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110831145027.ga25...@suffields.me.uk
Re: Reducing my involvement in Debian
On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 08:50:10AM +, Andrew Suffield wrote: It's due to some recent and inconveniently timed personal events rather than *anything* within Debian, but I'm going to be reducing my involvement considerably. I'm sure people who have no insight into my life will claim otherwise; they're full of shit, if you care. If you don't already know my reasons for this, and you most likely don't, you probably aren't going to. I'm ditching the packages I don't personally use. My handful of unfinished projects will probably remain that way. That includes my efforts to troll-proof debian-legal by documenting the deliberations, and the DFSG rewrite that never got out of my notebooks. If other people think these things are worth doing then they'll have to do them for themselves. signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: FYI, kernel firmware non-freeness discussions
On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 12:06:44AM +, Matthew Garrett wrote: That said, if not d-legal, then at least d-project. Indeed - I think discussion what what the DFSG /should/ mean (such as whether source code is required for certain items) is a project wide decision rather than a legal one. And the members of the project who have an interest in such matters are, by definition, the ones that subscribe to -legal. Continually trying to make out that an open subscription mailing list is some form of cabal, and that it is somehow in opposition to the rest of the project, is the stuff we'd expect of one of Terekhov's more delusional conspiracy theories. No matter how much you try to set them up in opposition to each other, the Debian mailing lists are divided by *topic*, nothing more. Matters relating to the DFSG are quite clearly on-topic for -legal, rather than one of the catch-all lists. This is not some government organisation, where decisions are handed out to different committees. This is a system for classifying discussions to make it easier to find the ones you're interested in. Anybody with an interest and a reasonable grasp of English can participate. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: FYI, kernel firmware non-freeness discussions
On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 02:08:22AM +, Matthew Garrett wrote: No matter how much you try to set them up in opposition to each other, the Debian mailing lists are divided by *topic*, nothing more. Matters relating to the DFSG are quite clearly on-topic for -legal, rather than one of the catch-all lists. That's odd. The description of -legal is Copyright, licensing and patent issues, whereas -project is Discussions about non-technical issues in the project. Handwaving. Until you anti-freedom advocates started your crap, these discussions have always happened on -legal - and even now, nearly all the meaningful ones happen here. The GFDL and associated documentation issues, the non-free firmware problem, etc. - here's where it gets worked out. Mostly what happens on other lists is people bitching that they don't like the answer, and saying change it (classical PHB syndrome). -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Distributing GPL software.
On Wed, Jan 11, 2006 at 10:42:06PM +, Daniel Carrera wrote: Alexander Terekhov wrote: It's easy. Modify or not. Let a friend of yours burn a CD. Acquire it from him without any I agree manifestations of [L]GPL acceptance, and redistribute it (i.e. that acquired CD) under any restrictive contractual TC you want (nothing but forbearance, for example). I'm not sure I understand this. Could you explain please? TC means Terms and Conditions, right? Terekhov has an 'interesting' interpretation of copyright which involves pretending it doesn't exist. I recommend you not do this (or at least not without asking your lawyer first, who will probably say no fucking way). Getting drawn into a discussion with him is probably a waste of your time. [And for reference, the doctrine of first sale is typically held to apply only when (amongst other things) (a) the work is sold, and (b) the work is not licensed in a manner that restricts transfer of ownership - neither of which are the case here]. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Distributing GPL software.
On Wed, Jan 11, 2006 at 09:44:32PM +, Daniel Carrera wrote: Is there any way out of this? I'm not modifying the source at all. I just download the tar.gz file and put it on a CD. Does this clause mean that everyone who is giving out OpenOffice or Knoppix CDs is breaking the law? You aren't required to give copies of the source to everybody. However, if somebody gives you a Knoppix CD, and you ask for the source, and they *refuse* (and don't exercise any of the other options either), then they would be breaking the law. This is also the easiest way to deal with your case - have copies of the source on hand, and give them to anybody who asks for them (charging extra for the extra media). Most people probably won't ask. Pointing to a third party website is not explicitly prohibited but it's also rather dubious. Particularly if it's one of ours - we do *not* normally provide source for a period of three years or longer. And you've got no way to guarantee that the site will be there for that long. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: the FSF's GPLv3 launch conference
On Sun, Jan 08, 2006 at 09:41:39PM +0100, Alexander Terekhov wrote: On 1/8/06, Andrew Donnellan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Free as in DFSG-free, FSF-free, OSI-open source, etc. http://www.opensource.org/licenses/afl-2.1.php http://www.opensource.org/licenses/osl-2.1.php Which is why OSI has become more or less irrelevant these days (as compared to their old state of mostly irrelevant). -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GR Proposal: GFDL statement
On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 06:15:18PM -0500, Alexander (Sasha) Wait wrote: I hate proprietary academic publishing, so, I'd like to see a pipeline from Academic Wikis to Academic Journals to Wikipedia. That pipeline will almost certainly be GFDL/CC-BY-SA. It's really sad to see blood boil over these licenses. Since I am talking to people at FSF CC regularly, I would be more than happy to bring Debian concerns to both groups in a, hopefuly, productive fashion.If there's a desire for that, just get in touch with me. We've already talked to CC and they agreed to fix their licenses; 3.0 and later should be fine, when they're released (2.x never will be). -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: the FSF's GPLv3 launch conference
On Sat, Jan 07, 2006 at 07:20:02PM +0100, Alexander Terekhov wrote: My suggestion to the FSF is to retire the [L]GPL ASAP and close the shop. I suggest to relicense the entire GPL'd code base under OSL/EPL/CPL/ real-stuff-like-that. I suggest you dig a hole and die in it. Really. If Rosen wrote a license then it's a good bet that it's not a free license. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Trolltech GPL violation?
On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 10:19:52AM +0100, Marco d'Itri wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Unfortunately the QPL is not a free license (although the Fortunately, most people disagree. The lurkers support me in email They all think I'm great don't you know. You posters just don't understand me But soon you will reap what you sow. Lurkers, lurkers, lurkers support me, you'll see, you'll see off in e-mail the lurkers support me, you'll see. Oh it's true, and you know they support me. There's thousands of lurkers out there! They all understand my intentions you posters are not being fair! Lurkers etc. The lurkers support me in email So why don't they post? you all cry They're scared of your hostile intentions they're not as courageous as I. Lurkers etc. One day I'll round up all my lurkers we'll have a newsgroup of our own without all this flak from you morons my lurkers will post round my throne. Lurkers etc. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Trolltech GPL violation?
On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 11:08:03PM +, Matthew Garrett wrote: Andrew Suffield [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 10:19:52AM +0100, Marco d'Itri wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Unfortunately the QPL is not a free license (although the Fortunately, most people disagree. The lurkers support me in email While I won't actually try to use this as an argument of fact, the majority of people I've spoken to about this don't feel happy about declaring the QPL non-free. And about declaring KDE non-free because it has an invalid license, and the GFDL, etcetera. Not being happy about it is quite irrelevant and also a rather strange things to say. Why would anybody be happy about discovering that something in main isn't free? That's a rather dubious suggestion to be making. Such conversations usually take the form waah, those evil debian-legal bastards are trying to throw $foo out of main, rather than here are the things which this license does not permit you to do, do you really think that's free?. As such they are in practice little more than trolling and their results disinteresting. It's also worth noting that historically we've tended to agree with the FSF over whether a software license is free or not. The fact that this has started to change recently suggests that somebody's opinion is changing. (The fact that the FSF declared the QPL a free software license really quite a long time ago may offer some insight into who's changing here) But that insight would be wrong. A little investigation into how the FSF deals with these things would reveal that they have no public analysis forum like debian-legal, and so they are most likely unaware of the issues and their declaration would therefore be a mistake on their part. Most likely, somebody just eyeballed it, said yes, that looks like it's supposed to be a free license, and added it to the list. Given the glacial pace at which the FSF normally operates, we (debian-legal) tend to get license bugs fixed before the FSF ever notices them. We're simply faster and more thorough so we find these things first. There's nothing interesting to see here - nothing is actually changing between us and the FSF (except for the GFDL strangeness - note that they agree with us that it's not a free software license, but merely claim that it's a free 'something else', without saying what that thing is). All that's really changing is that we've got a few people with odd agendas running around muck-flinging. Quite what this is supposed to accomplish is unclear. The only result I can think of is to inhibit the correction of licenses - effectively, to reduce the amount of free software available. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Trolltech GPL violation?
On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 09:58:17PM -0500, Glenn Maynard wrote: On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 01:50:54AM +, Andrew Suffield wrote: The source code for the documentation is embedded as comments in the program source code, in a doxygen-like way. Trolltech has not, to my knowledge, released the tool they use to generate the HTML from the comments. Then we do indeed have (yet again) a non-redistributable Qt bundle - the GPL explicitly includes such tools as 'source', with the singular exception that it doesn't include things normally shipped with the operating system (like generic compilers). The GPL says: The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. ^^ (If there's some other rationale for the GPL explicitly includes such tools as 'source', I missed it.) I was referencing the ^^^ed part. That sentence reads to me as 'the build system', and such a tool smells like part of the build system. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Trolltech GPL violation?
On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 09:34:52PM -0500, Brian Nelson wrote: Andrew Suffield [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 11:25:35AM -0500, Brian Nelson wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Trolltech releases the Open Source Edition of Qt under the GPL. The complete package downloadable from their website includes the libraries, tools like qtdesigner, and documentation in .html format. Source code for the libraries and tools is provided. However, no source code is provided for the .html documentation files. The source code for the documentation is embedded as comments in the program source code, in a doxygen-like way. Trolltech has not, to my knowledge, released the tool they use to generate the HTML from the comments. Then we do indeed have (yet again) a non-redistributable Qt bundle - the GPL explicitly includes such tools as 'source', with the singular exception that it doesn't include things normally shipped with the operating system (like generic compilers). It's also licensed under the QPL, which does not have this requirement. Unfortunately the QPL is not a free license (although the GPL-compatibility issue does not apply here). -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Trolltech GPL violation?
On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 10:37:47AM -0500, Glenn Maynard wrote: The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. ^^ (If there's some other rationale for the GPL explicitly includes such tools as 'source', I missed it.) I was referencing the ^^^ed part. That sentence reads to me as 'the build system', and such a tool smells like part of the build system. It doesn't say the build system. It says the scripts used to control compilation. Makefiles, linker scripts, autoconf templates. Shell scripts that generate makefiles. Packaging. Perl scripts that generate C source. Scripts that convert C source into HTML documentation. It's all the same stuff. Unless you would care to offer an unambiguous distinction between these based on the text quoted above? If it was meant to include compiler-like tools, it would say the compiler used to build the executable, but it clearly avoids that. If this was true then the next sentence would not say this: However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable. Note that it explicitly says 'compiler' here. This quite clearly indicates that the previous sentence is intended to apply to compilers, kernels, and so on - otherwise this would not be here. The entire purpose of the 'operating system' exception is to prevent the build-system clause from being too onerous and forcing you to provide gcc. (For good reason: compilers are *not* part of a program's source code, and the GPL's definition of the term tries to be in line with reality--with more success than most.) No. If you say that any 'compiler' is exempt then there is a large hole, whereby you create a secret compiler that generates proprietary code, for which the 'source' is undisclosed since it's part of the compiler (sounds unrealistic? it's more or less how game console development kits used to work - nowadays they do it in hardware instead). The GPL deliberately includes compilers not covered by the exception in order to close this hole. This *was* intentional. The GPL's definition of 'source' is approximately 'whatever you need in order to modify the program' translated into legalese. It is based on the FSF's four freedoms, not some notion of 'reality'. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Trolltech GPL violation?
On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 11:25:35AM -0500, Brian Nelson wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Trolltech releases the Open Source Edition of Qt under the GPL. The complete package downloadable from their website includes the libraries, tools like qtdesigner, and documentation in .html format. Source code for the libraries and tools is provided. However, no source code is provided for the .html documentation files. The source code for the documentation is embedded as comments in the program source code, in a doxygen-like way. Trolltech has not, to my knowledge, released the tool they use to generate the HTML from the comments. Then we do indeed have (yet again) a non-redistributable Qt bundle - the GPL explicitly includes such tools as 'source', with the singular exception that it doesn't include things normally shipped with the operating system (like generic compilers). I don't see how Trolltech are violating anything though, since they own the copyright. They just aren't being particularly useful, so we can't redistribute the offending html documents. Do we? The simplest solution would be for Trolltech to release the tool, and the next simplest would be for them to release the html documentation under a more permissive license. Shouldn't be too hard to get one of those done. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: contrib or main?
On Wed, Dec 07, 2005 at 03:51:23PM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote: Le mardi 06 décembre 2005 à 18:55 +, Andrew Suffield a écrit : main, definitely. There is a thriving community of developers of free gameboy games intended to run on these emulators. Don't ask me why, it makes no sense as far as I can see, but they're out there. One example is here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/opengbgames So you don't need non-free rom images. I presume the difference is that one maintainer knew this and the other didn't. (Please resist the urge to package them just to prove a point, we already have enough stuff in the archive with no point at all; their mere existence is sufficient) Shouldn't packages that require something outside the archive, be it free or not, be in contrib? It wouldn't make much sense to have the emulator depend on the games, now would it? It's always been kinda borderline in the case of the old console/gameboy emulators anyway, since a significant use for them is to play games which you copied from cartridges you bought (the adaptor plugs into a serial/parallel port, then you download the rom image from it). The parallel case here is oggenc/ogg123, which are mostly used for copying CDs you bought (and similar). We don't have to ship free audio files in order to justify having ogg123 in main. Or as an even closer example, if I invented a new VM bytecode and implemented the interpreter for it as free software, there's no reason why I should supply a useful program to run on it before it could go in main. Here I'm referring to mdk and mixal, a VM that is not intended for any practical use. ObMd: This is distinct from things which can *only* function with non-free works, like firmware images. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: contrib or main?
On Wed, Dec 07, 2005 at 06:44:53PM -0500, Glenn Maynard wrote: It can be applied to just about anything in contrib: an application that is nonfunctional without a non-free library doesn't require it, it's just not very useful without it; a Java application doesn't require a JRE, it's just not very useful without one. The distinction lies somewhere in the region of intended usage. A DVD player? That's fine, we don't need to ship a dvd-video image - people are going to play all kinds of stuff, some of which will be their own creation and some of which will be free. An application where everybody is going to install a non-free library before they run it? That's obviously Marco d'Itri again. Please don't fall prey to his rules-lawyering, you really *can't* reduce this stuff to a set of programmatic rules. You do have to exercise judgement in good faith (neither blindly following rules nor attempting to abuse them). If you think about substantial non-infringing usage then you're not too far from the mark. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Proposed license for IETF Contributions
On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 06:03:00PM +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote: I've changed it into: Without separate permission, redistributed modified works must (a) not claim endorsement of the modified work by the IETF, IESG, IANA, IAB, ISOC, RFC Editor, or any similar organization, and (b) remove any claims of status as an Internet Standard, for example, by removing the RFC boilerplate. I rather suspect that by the time you've finished editing this paragraph, it's just going to say: If no special exceptions have been granted, redistributed modified works must comply with all applicable laws. Which is a waste of space, really. In most countries it is a breach of copyright law to claim that somebody wrote something when they actually didn't, regardless of whether you're adding or removing attributions in the process, and you generally can't license or otherwise sign away that restriction - otherwise all the media companies would force people to sign contracts waiving their right to attribution. For example, the relevant part of US law is this: (a) False Copyright Management Information. No person shall knowingly and with the intent to induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal infringement (1) provide copyright management information that is false, or (2) distribute or import for distribution copyright management information that is false. (c) Definition. As used in this section, the term copyright management information means any of the following information conveyed in connection with copies or phonorecords of a work or performances or displays of a work, including in digital form, except that such term does not include any personally identifying information about a user of a work or of a copy, phonorecord, performance, or display of a work: (1) The title and other information identifying the work, including the information set forth on a notice of copyright. (2) The name of, and other identifying information about, the author of a work. (3) The name of, and other identifying information about, the copyright owner of the work, including the information set forth in a notice of copyright. ... (6) Terms and conditions for use of the work. (7) Identifying numbers or symbols referring to such information or links to such information. -- Title 17, Chaper 12, Section 1202 Which appears to be what you're trying to say. Why are you trying to rewrite the law in a license statement? Also, since chapter 12 is the DMCA one, when violated for financial/commercial gain this one is a criminal offense ($500k and/or 5 year jail term limit for the first one). Talk about overkill. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GFDL Statistics
On Sun, Dec 04, 2005 at 11:30:17AM -0800, Sean Kellogg wrote: On Sunday 04 December 2005 09:38 am, Francesco Poli wrote: If I understand correctly what you mean, you are talking about statistics automatically generated by a specific program that counts words in the document, or something similar. If this is the case, I would say there's no creativity in the statistics generation process. Probably no creative expression from the original document ends up in the statitics, either. Then, the statistics are not eligible for copyright protection, that is to say, they are not copyrighted. Yes, that's right on. The final document that will be produced (as described at least) is not a copy of the original and is not a derivative since it does not involve an act of authorship. Unless the statistics contain enough information to reconstruct the original document verbatim, in which case it almost certainly qualifies as a derivative (or literal copying, depending on jurisdiction) since it's simple transformation... corner case, but it's there. From the context... unlikely but maybe. It's definitely fair use though, if your country has such a thing. Mine doesn't (nobody is sure what this means in practical terms, ambiguity abounds). -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: contrib or main?
On Tue, Dec 06, 2005 at 09:03:19AM +0100, Robert Millan wrote: gngb is in main, gnuboy is in contrib. They both are GPLed, so the obvious question is, what's the difference? If requiring non-free ROMs to run justifies putting it in contrib, then I think gngb should be moved. Otherwise it's gnuboy that should be moved. main, definitely. There is a thriving community of developers of free gameboy games intended to run on these emulators. Don't ask me why, it makes no sense as far as I can see, but they're out there. One example is here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/opengbgames So you don't need non-free rom images. I presume the difference is that one maintainer knew this and the other didn't. (Please resist the urge to package them just to prove a point, we already have enough stuff in the archive with no point at all; their mere existence is sufficient) -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#238245: Debian website's copyright and license suggestions?
On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 03:53:48AM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote: And what would be good license for Debians web pages? (This is about content, the scripts used in generation are GNU GPL or otherwise freely licensed.) Either GNU GPL v. 2 or 2-clause BSD or MIT/Expat. Author's choice, I think. I would encourage MIT-style licenses here, at least for the 'important' pages - I can't see how copyleft gains us any benefits in this particular case, and it would be nice to be able to paste random chunks from the website into random documentation. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Mozilla can't be GPL? (was: pkcs#11 license)
On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 04:41:27PM +, MJ Ray wrote: It is interesting. Could one read the API reference documentation and recreate the header files from the ideas? Except for any magic constants (which can be extracted from the documentation), I can recreate a C header from the code that uses it. This really isn't difficult. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Java License
On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 03:57:40AM +0100, Jo?o Pinheiro wrote: If I understand this correctly, it should possible for me to bundle the JDK along with the distro for as long as it's only distributed inside my university. Am I correct? Maybe. Sun are notoriously arseholes about this. Also, what would unmodified mean in this context? Is it possible for me to unpack and install the JDK on the system (without modifying any of the files) or am I forced to distribute the original self-extracting .bin file? Every copy of Java distributed must be bit-for-bit the file blessed by Sun, and no variations are permitted. At one point, Blackdown were going through the agonisingly complex process of getting Sun to bless a .deb file, but they haven't done it for anything newer than 1.4. They aren't very happy about the idea of it not being downloaded directly from Sun's servers, either. You could try asking Sun if this is okay but they'll probably say no just out of habit. They are *monumentally* proprietary about Java - Sun are determined to retain absolute control over it. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: CDDL
On Thu, Sep 15, 2005 at 11:01:53PM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote: I determine whether a point is a standard response by this very simple metric: If I personally am aware of this point occurring in the context of two or more distinct licenses, it's a standard response. Being applicable in multiple cases does not make it wrong, you know. Yes, I am quite aware of that, given that there is, right now, one valid and one invalid point at the top level of the standard/ tree. I expect both numbers to increase. I don't believe anybody has claimed otherwise, so far. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GPL, yet again. (The kernel is a lot like a shared library)
On Tue, Sep 13, 2005 at 04:06:00AM +0200, Claus F?rber wrote: Andrew Suffield [EMAIL PROTECTED] schrieb/wrote: On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 05:52:00PM +0200, Claus F?rber wrote: So one of the assumptions made above is wrong. The one where you assumed that dynamic linking was relevent. I've been saying that all along. You were also saying that C is probably a derivative of O: | I do not know how a program that really used openssl, calling its | functions, could avoid being a derivative. I can't rule it out but (The typical case for dynamic linking is that there are function calls.) For a high-level argumentation like mine, it does not matter whether the legal link between C and O is created by dynamic linking, incorporating function calls, or anything else, the result is always the same: If O can be replaced by M, the assumption that B/C is a derivative of O, must be wrong. The difference is that when you talk about dynamic linking, the 'replacement' means fiddling with linker options or package dependencies. It is indeed nonsense to conclude that doing these things would change the copyright status of the program using the libraries. When you talk about writing programs, 'replacement' means rewriting parts of it. I don't think anybody here is going to find it difficult to believe that rewriting the program to use M instead of O would change the copyright status of the program you are rewriting parts of. Your entire argument is based on the fact that it's nonsense for dynamic linking because replacing one external run-time library with another shouldn't change the copyright status of the program using it. Yes, it's nonsense - but you're the one who introduced it. The introduction of dynamic linking was the mistaken assumption. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GPL, yet again. (The kernel is a lot like a shared library)
On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 01:14:21AM +0200, Alexander Terekhov wrote: Hint: http://europa.eu.int/idabc/servlets/Doc?id=21197 (... Besides, too overbroad a viral effect ...) This document is a report from two french bureaucrats and one employee of Unisys corp, recommending methods of licensing which are in line with the aims of the EU. Can't see the relevence. These are people working for the EU deciding what to do with software they write. They are not people deciding what laws to make. This sentence continues: [...] Each author is the sole person entitled to decide upon the ways of exploiting his/her work. As an anarchist I wholeheartedly support this principle, it being the core of anarchist philosophy. Unfortunately it is not the case that the law reflects it, nor does market practice. Authors very rarely have sole entitlement to decide what may be done with their work. Only in the realm of GPLed software do they often have any say in the decision at all. With MIT-style licensing they abandon any such control; with commercial licensing they yield it all to the control of their employer. Those commission folks don't quite see the light regarding static linking yet... but that's correctable. I support any efforts to defang copyright and remove such wanton disrespect for individual liberty from the law. However, the simple fact remains that no such efforts have, to date, been effective. We have to deal with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GPL, yet again. (The kernel is a lot like a shared library)
On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 01:20:17PM -0300, Humberto Massa Guimar?es wrote: I can't see how can programX possibly be a derivative work of libopenssl or of libnvossl. Can you please explain it to me, like if I was a four-year-old? You stole somebody else's work when you wrote programX. Piracy is wrong. You are destroying the hopes and dreams of an entire industry. [0] Your entire argument is based on the fact that it's nonsense for dynamic linking because replacing one external run-time library with another shouldn't change the copyright status of the program using it. Yes, it's nonsense - but you're the one who introduced it. The introduction of dynamic linking was the mistaken assumption. Why is the introduction of dynamic linking the mistaken assumption? This was explained in the part you deleted. [0] This appears to be the way it is explained to four-year-olds -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: CDDL
On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 11:57:43PM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Here's what I have in mind: http://people.debian.org/~asuffield/licenses/cddl/summary.html I especially liked the way you determine which arguments are correct and which ones standard responses... The word 'correct' does not appear. A point is considered valid if it has no valid rebuttals. This is an elementary principle of debate. I determine whether a point is a standard response by this very simple metric: If I personally am aware of this point occurring in the context of two or more distinct licenses, it's a standard response. This is a reflection of the way the code is organised; they're symlinks from within the cddl/ tree at the top level to the standard/ tree. It handles points being repeated in multiple discussions, without having to drag us through all the same stuff every time. An alternative name, instead of 'standard', is 'the anti-Marco-d'Itri feature', but I discarded this as being too hard to type. It defeats people who try to win arguments or simply sabotage debian-legal by repeatedly raising the same points in different contexts and hoping that other people get too tired to keep on smacking them down. Anything that shows up as a duplicate later will also get moved into standard/. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: CDDL
On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 11:07:23PM +0200, Francesco Poli wrote: Will the mail-minute-maker scripts be released? I hope so (above all things I hope that the reply will not be which scripts? it's all done by hand!). It's generated by a fairly icky perl script from a tree of files, in the directories as attribute lists method, where the tree reflects the structure of the debate. The data set contains a summary of each point, its nature (this is free, this isn't free, this is wrong, I dunno what this is, etc), and some links to the list archives. I'm assembling that by hand this time; if it works out reasonably well then I'll come up with more automation for next time (it's painfully time-consuming to paste this stuff together from the archives but gets the job done sooner than something complex involving mbox-processing on master). -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Choice-of-venue and forking
On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 01:32:05PM +0200, Henning Makholm wrote: Scripsit Bernhard R. Link [EMAIL PROTECTED] I wanted to ask the more knowing ones what effects this will have in the most jurisdictions when forking code with such a clause in the license. If neighter the licensee nor the licensor are any more in the jurisdiction choosen by the clause, what will happen? First, if both parties in a case agree to using a venue other than the one specified in the licence, it has no effect. (The parties, when agreeing, are always free to amend their earlier agreement at will). It is in general possible that the specified forum refuses to take the case if neither of the parties have a relevant connection to the country or state that sponsors the court The second point here also applies to the first: the alternate venue stipulated by the parties can tell them to go shove it. Any previously agreed choice of venue clause *might* be a factor in this decision. That's going to vary with the policies of the specific court you're trying to take the case to. It is possible (albeit not always the case) that the venue in the license is the only choice you have. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: celestia and JPL license
On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 05:49:46PM +0100, Lewis Jardine wrote: If the clause were demanding that attribution go right next to the use of the image, this would be non-free, right? Yes, constraints on the *manner* in which you credit somebody are generally non-free. Licenses that merely require you credit the author in some reasonable manner *of your own choice* are generally free. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GPL, yet again. (The kernel is a lot like a shared library)
On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 01:53:10PM -0300, Humberto Massa Guimar?es wrote: Now seriously, can you please explain to me: 1. do you think programX is a derivative work of libopenssl? 2. why? 3. do you think programX is a derivative work of libnovossl? 4. why? I keep making questions, and you keep giving me non-sequiturs. You keep asking questions that don't have answers because you phrase them in terms of dynamic linking all the time. None of these four questions are answerable because the only thing you've said is that programX is dynamically linked to libssl and that both these packages contain a libssl file. THAT IS NOT RELEVANT INFORMATION. As I said the last time you asked this exact same question, it depends on all the stuff you haven't said. I also sketched out the conditions for the various possible answers. I'm not going to repeat it again. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Problems with ntp
On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 09:53:59AM +0200, Matthijs Mohlmann wrote: George Danchev wrote: On Wednesday 14 September 2005 10:03, Steve Langasek wrote: On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 01:07:30AM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote: I just discovered that the ntp source is a nest of licensing problems. The arlib subdir isn't distributable. Neither is the entire libparse subdir, or anything else by Frank Kardel. I'm not actually sure it will build without these bits. So I guess NTP should be removed from Debian. It's not very maintained anyhow, having multiple RC bugs open for quite a while. What are you going to replace it with? AFAIK, ntp is the only package we have in Debian which supports useful clock synchronization, which is essential for a number of other services (e.g., Kerberos). I've never tested openntpd, but it is the obvious replacement in case of legal problems with ntp and it has been released with sarge. I use openntpd and that works better then ntp IMHO. It lacks ntp's fast-start functionality, which means it's dependent on something vaguely like ntpdate. It's also generally feature-crippled compared to ntp - but it's from openbsd so that's hardly a surprise. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: CDDL
On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 11:54:33AM +, MJ Ray wrote: Andrew Suffield [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Here's what I have in mind: http://people.debian.org/~asuffield/licenses/cddl/summary.html It looks a comprehensive minute apart from repeated points, but some of the stock language needs a tune-up (Who cares whether the licence is DFSG-free? We package software not licences!) Yeah, half of it is still just exposing the data structures anyway. I threw most of the text together in a hurry. Can't make up my mind whether to write in more accurate text or just use an arbitrary name and link to a description. and you already plan to work on the presentation. I think the biggest improvements would be to replace message-id on the index with a format like local_part.MMDD.HH:MM (so henning.0909.14:51 is the first) That's actually more data than I currently store. I'll have to think of a more sensible way of collecting it. Getting those list archive URLs is really fucking hard. and to use a dl instead of a ul for the first level. Bah, I'd have to expand my html repertoire beyond half a dozen tags. In general, I'm impressed and the idea could be used in a lot of places to avoid sending everyone to wade through tons of verbose mail. Will the mail-minute-maker scripts be released? Probably next weekend, I need to defuck a bunch of stuff first. It's highly specific to -legal though. I haven't given much thought to how the logic could be restructured for other kinds of debate; notably this assumes that the only things worth talking about are Yes, this license permits each of the things required by a free license, No, this license includes a non-free restriction, and rebuttals to points (a license is free if it permits all the stuff on the list and doesn't have any valid objections; a point is valid if it has no replies, or if it has no valid rebuttals). I suppose it could run in a degraded mode without any logic to summarise the (current) conclusion, just showing the argument structure. You'd lose the ability to see which points are still important though; a big part of this is that as threads get killed off, they disappear to the 'invalid' chunk at the bottom of the list, so you can just look at the outstanding issues. I expect that any significantly large thread on -legal will generate lots of dead arguments, which is kinda the point. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: CDDL
On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 07:28:46PM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote: [License follows as inline MIME foo] html2text is a piece of crap. At the same time, I'd like to experiment with an idea I've been toying with for a slightly more (informally) directed approach to license analysis, that should prove harder to derail with long pointless tangents and more immune to revisionism by the hecklers. We've tried several attempts at summarising the conclusions on this list in the past, but they've always floundered because ultimately, they did not reflect the way that we do things. We *don't* produce a detailed description of what's wrong with a license, we just discuss it on a mailing list. The problem with that is that it's hard to follow for people not involved. The idea is basically this: since we can't realistically impose a conventional debate structure on a mailing list, turn it around and realise that we don't need to bother. Some basic rules of form can be applied after the event, and then we just look at the result and see what actual valid conclusions the discussion produced, if any. Here's what I have in mind: http://people.debian.org/~asuffield/licenses/cddl/summary.html It's essentially a record of what happened, arranged in the logical structure of the arguments made. At the same time, it's a summary of the conclusion, and a hit list of the things you have to disprove if you want to change the outcome. It's intended to be kept roughly up to date as the discussion progresses. It is not intended to replace documents like http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.html although it may be a useful resource in writing them. I'll take typographical corrections, and restatements of a point to improve clarity, but if you have anything new to add, you should be making your case to the list. This is just a record, not a new forum for debate. [This is by way of a working prototype; I have a whole bunch of things I still want to do to present the information in a more useful manner, and my approach to duplicated points is currently flawed so some mails in the thread aren't currently represented here. I'm planning to fix this sometime in the next week. Also it looks like crap. I'm not planning to fix that]. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: CDDL, OpenSolaris, Choice-of-venue and the star package ...
On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 06:52:07PM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote: On Fri, 09 Sep 2005, John Hasler wrote: Gunnar Wolf writes: ...Or get him extradited somehow. Extradition has nothing to do with civil lawsuits. Hey, copyright infringement is a crime these days... And the US has obtained extradition treaties for it and is using them. I've lost my reference on that one, sorry. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: fresh review of: CDDL
On Sat, Sep 10, 2005 at 12:01:13AM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: Humberto Massa Guimarães [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: FWIW, the phrasing comes verbatim from MPL 1.1. MPL 1.1 is DFSG-free, right? not according to http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/06/msg00221.html Someone should really file a removal request against Mozilla. We've been quietly tolerating them on the understanding that they were actively working on getting the last of it GPLed and couldn't forsee any problems. Personally, I don't have a problem with this, so long as we're reasonably confident that it will be free soon. I'm not willing to defend the position though. And it sounds like it's not an issue any more. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: CDDL, OpenSolaris, Choice-of-venue and the star package ...
On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 05:35:36PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: George Danchev [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Friday 09 September 2005 18:24, Matthew Garrett wrote: But that's already possible. The majority (all?) of licenses that we ship don't prevent me from being sued arbitrarily. The only difference that choice of venue makes is that it potentially increases the cost for me. Within the UK alone, I can end up paying fairly large travel fees to deal with a court case. But I'll have to pay a lot more for a lawyer. Being sued in the US wouldn't be significantly more expensive for me than being sued here. The problem is not only with the expensive funny lawsuit trips, you may find some jurisdictions and local lows quite ... let's say just strange. That's choice of law, rather than choice of venue. I was under the impression that it was generally accepted. Only insofar as the laws generally chosen are accepted. If somebody showed up with a choice for Swaziland[0], we might have a problem with that. But although US law is fairly right-wing, and German law is fairly crazy, neither of them are actually prejudicial in a fair court. [0] It's an autocracy (under state of emergency rules for about 30 years, they're currently trying to reestablish some semblence of democracy); the case would be determined by who paid the largest bribe to the king. Given his proclivities, that might be the one with the cutest intern. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: CDDL, OpenSolaris, Choice-of-venue and the star package ...
On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 10:24:19PM +1000, Paul TBBle Hampson wrote: On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 02:30:05PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote: 9. MISCELLANEOUS. Any law or regulation which provides that the language of a contract shall be construed against the drafter shall not apply to this License. Can a license exclude application of laws? Maybe there's a jurisdiction which has such a law on the books, which _can_ be opted out of, but I doubt such exists, as it would defeat the purpose of having that law in the first place. Under certain limited conditions, yes. Generally, no. There's a few statutes on the books around the place which say This applies to [...] unless waived by both parties and similar stuff. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: CDDL, OpenSolaris, Choice-of-venue and the star package ...
On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 12:44:56PM -0500, John Hasler wrote: Henning Makholm writes: A bicycle trip to my local courthouse: DKK 2, including write-offs on the bicycle. A trip to some court in America: Tens of thousands of DKKs. If I were to sue you for infringing the copyright on my GPL software I would file in US district court. Assuming it's a nuisance lawsuit, I would ignore it (or file a written statement to this effect), and let the judgement lapse (assuming the court itself didn't just acknowledge my point and throw it out), since I have no intention to enter US territory at any point. When you filed in a UK court to attempt to enforce the US judgement, I would raise the defence that the claim was nonsense. If you bring choice-of-venue into the picture, it becomes rather more murky. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GPL, yet again. (The kernel is a lot like a shared library)
On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 05:52:00PM +0200, Claus F?rber wrote: So one of the assumptions made above is wrong. The one where you assumed that dynamic linking was relevent. I've been saying that all along. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GPL, yet again. (The kernel is a lot like a shared library)
On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 09:54:04AM -0300, Humberto Massa Guimar?es wrote: On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 04:22:18PM -0300, Humberto Massa Guimar?es wrote: If you're going to make an argument at odds with established understanding and industry practice then you'll have to come up with more than that. There's an awful lot of lawyers and law professors who think that the GPL works. Go start by arguing with them. I can't argue with someone who offers ABSOLUTELY NO ARGUMENT. You are the one who is supposedly attempting to offer an argument here. Not me. I'm just telling you why yours is broken. That doesn't No, you are not telling me why my argument is broken. If you are trying, you're not being very clear. Why is my argument broken exactly? By trivially continuing it to the next obvious point, it concludes that the GPL doesn't work. Therefore it's broken somewhere. Figuring out where is left as an exercise for the students. I really don't care about the details. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GPL, yet again. (The kernel is a lot like a shared library)
On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 09:30:17PM +0100, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote: No, you are not telling me why my argument is broken. If you are trying, you're not being very clear. Why is my argument broken exactly? By trivially continuing it to the next obvious point, it concludes that the GPL doesn't work. Therefore it's broken somewhere. Figuring out where is left as an exercise for the students. I really don't care about the details. Ah, but this is based on the assumption that the GPL actually does work. The argument was intended to show that it doesn't, and apparently succeeds at this. I am acutely disinterested in that debate because it's long and boring, but there's a lot of law professors who like it and think that the GPL does work. I suggest you go argue with them instead. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: CDDL, OpenSolaris, Choice-of-venue and the star package ...
On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 03:56:47PM -0400, David Nusinow wrote: On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 08:44:39PM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote: On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 12:44:56PM -0500, John Hasler wrote: Henning Makholm writes: A bicycle trip to my local courthouse: DKK 2, including write-offs on the bicycle. A trip to some court in America: Tens of thousands of DKKs. If I were to sue you for infringing the copyright on my GPL software I would file in US district court. Assuming it's a nuisance lawsuit, I would ignore it (or file a written statement to this effect), and let the judgement lapse (assuming the court itself didn't just acknowledge my point and throw it out), since I have no intention to enter US territory at any point. When you filed in a UK court to attempt to enforce the US judgement, I would raise the defence that the claim was nonsense. This is sort of like saying I block you with my force field! Saying the claim is nonsense if John has good evidence that you are infringing on his copyright isn't going to get you far. Not really interested in the case where you actually did infringe on the license. I don't think it's worthwhile to worry about whether we discriminate against such people. Nuisance lawsuits are the canonical example of the important part here. That's the scenario where choice-of-venue is bad. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: legal status of faac, xvid
On Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 09:20:13AM -0700, seven sins wrote: i am looking for information on how the debian teams views legal status of faac and xvid. work for a company where we use debian, folks on the research team want to do use these for some reason. before i install these i wanted to check on the legal status for there quite a bit of messages on it and i am kind of clueless about it. Nobody is really sure about the legal status of contemporary video codecs. There are more patents on video encoding than you can shake a stick at. The MPEG-LA claims to hold all the patents applicable to MPEG, and that all these patents are valid, but since it's impossible for them to know either of these things they are obviously lying. It's never been seriously tested in court. So, get yourself a lawyer and check the details of their malpractice insurance very carefully. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GPL, yet again. (The kernel is a lot like a shared library)
On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 01:22:07PM -0300, Humberto Massa Guimar?es wrote: 3.3. it seems to me that it's absurd to think, for instance, that Debian cannot dynamic link a GPLd program with OpenSSL. Why? Because if I write a completely-compatible MassaSSL library and install it in my system just in the same places/names/sonames/whatever OpenSSL is installed, this would change the copyright status of _the_ _program_!! This says that there can be no such thing as copyright infringement for creating a derivative of a piece of software, because you can always replace the original with a reimplementation that wouldn't be infringement. While it may be an interesting legal theory that copyright infringement in software can only apply to verbatim copying (and one that has been proposed before by various crackpots), I would not like to rely on it in court, because it's absurd. I'll leave it as an exercise for the students to find where the argument went wrong; the mere existence of a flawed conclusion is enough to convince me that it went wrong *somewhere*. Go back and do it again in a manner that concludes derivative works are normally infringement, and explains why this case is different. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GPL, yet again. (The kernel is a lot like a shared library)
On Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 06:50:00PM -0400, Joe Smith wrote: While I would like to belive that the FSF knew exactly what they were doing, I am not certain. It is generally belived that the GPL 'derivative' clauses may actually be upheld in the case of static libraries. The fact that linking the .o's of the library directly with your program is equivelent to linking the library with the object files of your program, seems to verify this. The question still debated is whether Shared libraries are like this also. It's the wrong question. This is a FAQ here. Stop thinking about libraries. Libraries are not relevant. You're getting misled by technial details of how libraries are implemented, when in fact the whole issue is a red herring. Start thinking about source. The question you need to ask yourself is: Is this piece of software, in source form, a derivative of openssl? If it has been written to include and extend the behaviour of openssl by calling its functions - for example, the piece of software is an implementation of HTTPS, an SSL-derived protocol - then the source is probably a derivative of openssl. The shared library form is then trivially a derivative because it's a transformation of the source, but we don't actually care about that - the fact that the source is a derivative is enough to be a blocking issue. You will note that this allows for the possibility of software linked to openssl that is not a derivative of it. The trivial example is to take a copy of GNU hello, and add -lssl to LDFLAGS. That doesn't make it a derivative of openssl. You will also note that this excludes the possibility of being able to evade copyright law via technicalities of how you build the software. That's an expected property of a well-formulated law. I do not know how a program that really used openssl, calling its functions, could avoid being a derivative. I can't rule it out but I've never seen a plausible argument for it and I can't imagine what one would look like. If anybody wants to try arguing that case here, expect it to be a really hard sell. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: CDDL, OpenSolaris, Choice-of-venue and the star package ...
On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 04:53:12PM +0300, George Danchev wrote: On Thursday 08 September 2005 16:21, Sven Luther wrote: --cut-- Yeah, well, i did an apt-get install star and looked at the copyright file, so i am not sure what facts i have to believe then. http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/s/star/star_1.4a17-3/star .copyright Took about ten seconds to find out it was GPL before upstream relicensed and debian maint just copied that. Ah, ok, nice to know. Note that the latest upstream development version is star-1.5a67.tar.gz [1] and is CDDL licensed with the following slight modifications: Which constitutes a trademark violation at the very least (it's not the CDDL any more) and quite probably a copyright one (the CDDL isn't modifiable). Yeesh. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GPL, yet again. (The kernel is a lot like a shared library)
On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 10:46:32AM -0700, Sean Kellogg wrote: But what is clear is that a derivative work requires an act of copying the original work of authorship. The caselaw in question is Lee v. A.R.T. Co. (125 F.3d 580) where someone took a piece of art they purchased, fused it to an ashtray or something and then resold it. The original artist said that was a derivative work and the sale was illegal. The court found that it was not a derivative work because no copies were being made. A legal copy was merged with something else and the first sale doctrine bared A.R.T. Co. from prohibiting resale of its original art. So with shared libraries the question is not whether it extends functionality, snip irrelevant distraction about technicalities of shared libraries It'd be nice if this fairly optimistic view of copyright as applied to software would be upheld in the real world, because it would mean we could stop worrying about derivative works and modify[0] anything we liked; the only limitation would be on distribution (be even nicer if we could scrap that too, which would mean copyright wouldn't exist and the only requirement for being free software would be that you have the source). But I'm not hopeful that it would be, particularly since all the corporations and lawyers seem to think otherwise. Also, this completely defeats the GPL, permitting proprietary software to be based on it and making it functionally equivalent to the LGPL. Of course, if this were upheld in court, everybody would just leap to using contracts instead of licenses, and explicitly prohibiting quasi-derivation-via-merging. Enough courts have already upheld that you can substitute a contract for a copyright license and ignore all the limitations of copyright law. [0] I can trivially implement, in a matter of a few hours, a system which will let you modify any piece of software you have on a given platform in a manner that could only be described as 'merging it with something else'. If your platform is perl or some similar ASCII-text script, the system is patch(1). With minimal extra effort I can ensure that this happens only at execution time, and that no copies are stored. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GPL, yet again. (The kernel is a lot like a shared library)
On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 02:27:45PM -0300, Humberto Massa Guimar?es wrote: ** Andrew Suffield :: On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 01:22:07PM -0300, Humberto Massa Guimar?es wrote: 3.3. it seems to me that it's absurd to think, for instance, that Debian cannot dynamic link a GPLd program with OpenSSL. Why? Because if I write a completely-compatible MassaSSL library and install it in my system just in the same places/names/sonames/whatever OpenSSL is installed, this would change the copyright status of _the_ _program_!! This says that there can be no such thing as copyright infringement for creating a derivative of a piece of software, because you can always replace the original with a reimplementation that wouldn't be infringement. my knowledge of the English language is still worse than I tought, because I do not have any recollection of meaning what you said _at_ _all_. Remember: DERIVATIVE == TRANSFORMATION. Word games, no change in meaning. You're saying that Only the verbatim copying of a copyrighted text, possibly with modifications, can constitute copyright infringement; all other actions are legal. The rest of your mail just ranted the same thing several times. My point stands. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
CDDL
On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 03:55:56PM +0200, Dalibor Topic wrote: The discussions on CDDL in 2005-01 seem to have petered out inconclusively. Let's do something about this. At the same time, I'd like to experiment with an idea I've been toying with for a slightly more (informally) directed approach to license analysis, that should prove harder to derail with long pointless tangents and more immune to revisionism by the hecklers. So, I'm throwing out a call for comments on the CDDL. Forget the last time we went through it and start over (or dig through it if you want and summarise interesting stuff here). Go over it with a fine tooth comb, find anything that you think is or might be objectionable, and reply to this mail with something vaguely resembling a bulleted list of points. For each, highlight the offending clause and the reason why it sucks. Please be careful to note the distinction between 'is' and 'might be', and for the latter, explain the conditions that would make it suck. (This is a minimally more structured variation on our normal dogpile strategy; the interesting part comes next. It's easier for me to demonstrate than to explain). [License follows as inline MIME foo] -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | ******** CCOOMMMMOONN DDEEVVEELLOOPPMMEENNTT AANNDD DDIISSTTRRIIBBUUTTIIOONN LLIICCEENNSSEE ((CCDDDDLL)) VVeerrssiioonn 11..00 ******** * 11.. DDeeffiinniittiioonnss.. o 11..11.. CCoonnttrriibbuuttoorr means each individual or entity that creates or contributes to the creation of Modifications. o 11..22.. CCoonnttrriibbuuttoorr VVeerrssiioonn means the combination of the Original Software, prior Modifications used by a Contributor (if any), and the Modifications made by that particular Contributor. o 11..33.. CCoovveerreedd SSooffttwwaarree means (a) the Original Software, or (b) Modifications, or (c) the combination of files containing Original Software with files containing Modifications, in each case including portions thereof. o 11..44.. EExxeeccuuttaabbllee means the Covered Software in any form other than Source Code. o 11..55.. IInniittiiaall DDeevveellooppeerr means the individual or entity that first makes Original Software available under this License. o 11..66.. LLaarrggeerr WWoorrkk means a work which combines Covered Software or portions thereof with code not governed by the terms of this License. o 11..77.. LLiicceennssee means this document. o 11..88.. LLiicceennssaabbllee means having the right to grant, to the maximum extent possible, whether at the time of the initial grant or subsequently acquired, any and all of the rights conveyed herein. o 11..99.. MMooddiiffiiccaattiioonnss means the Source Code and Executable form of any of the following: # AA.. Any file that results from an addition to, deletion from or modification of the contents of a file containing Original Software or previous Modifications; # BB.. Any new file that contains any part of the Original Software or previous Modification; or # CC.. Any new file that is contributed or otherwise made available under the terms of this License. o 11..1100.. OOrriiggiinnaall SSooffttwwaarree means the Source Code and Executable form of computer software code that is originally released under this License. o 11..1111.. PPaatteenntt CCllaaiimmss means any patent claim(s), now owned or hereafter acquired, including without limitation, method, process, and apparatus claims, in any patent Licensable by grantor. o 11..1122.. SSoouurrccee CCooddee means (a) the common form of computer software code in which modifications are made and (b) associated documentation included in or with such code. o 11..1133.. YYoouu ((oorr YYoouurr)) means an individual or a legal entity exercising rights under, and complying with all of the terms of, this License. For legal entities, You includes any entity which controls, is controlled by, or is under common control with You. For purposes of this definition, control means
Re: GPL, yet again. (The kernel is a lot like a shared library)
On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 03:32:26PM -0300, Humberto Massa Guimar?es wrote: I did _not_ just ranted the same. I did offer you an example of how you are simply plain wrong -- as is the GPL FSF FAQ -- when you say that linking to a library creates a derivative work. Argument from authority and a straw man, yawn. A derivative work is NOT what you want it to be... it's a very well-defined (by code law and case law) legal entity. And it happens to differ (a lot) of what you think it is. If you're going to make an argument at odds with established understanding and industry practice then you'll have to come up with more than that. There's an awful lot of lawyers and law professors who think that the GPL works. Go start by arguing with them. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: legal status of faac, xvid
On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 10:36:19AM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote: It's never been seriously tested in court. What's to test? It's just method of licensing a slew of patents. The legitimacy of their claimed patents. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GPL, yet again. (The kernel is a lot like a shared library)
On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 11:53:57AM -0700, Sean Kellogg wrote: On Thursday 08 September 2005 11:38 am, Andrew Suffield wrote: There's an awful lot of lawyers and law professors who think that the GPL works. Go start by arguing with them. Based on my readings of law review articles and the common legal arguments surrounding the GPL, the reason it works is because the GPL is a contract. The linking clause is a contractual term that you must agree to in order to receive a copyright license. Pretty standard forbearance. Then your entire argument is irrelevent. If the GPL stands as a contract then it's valid, period. And there is no 'linking clause' in the GPL. The string 'link' only occurs once in the whole COPYING file, and that's in the postamble, not the license. The *only* thing there is, is the restriction on derivatives, which operates how I described or not at all. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GPL, yet again. (The kernel is a lot like a shared library)
On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 04:22:18PM -0300, Humberto Massa Guimar?es wrote: If you're going to make an argument at odds with established understanding and industry practice then you'll have to come up with more than that. There's an awful lot of lawyers and law professors who think that the GPL works. Go start by arguing with them. I can't argue with someone who offers ABSOLUTELY NO ARGUMENT. You are the one who is supposedly attempting to offer an argument here. Not me. I'm just telling you why yours is broken. That doesn't require a counter-argument in this case. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Please check draft font license for StixFonts - is it suitably free?
On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 10:37:17PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote: | The Font Software may not be modified or altered in any way, except | that: (a) the Fonts may be converted from one format to another | (e.g., from TrueType to Postscript), in which case the normal and | reasonable distortion that occurs during such conversion shall be | permitted; and (b) additional glyphs or characters may be added to | the Fonts, so long as the base set of glyphs is not modified or | removed. Clearly non-free. I can understand why people think that such a clause is a technical necessity (reproducible layout), but it still violates DFSG clause 3. The parallel argument for programs is that they shouldn't be modifiable so as to give reproducible output. Let the program be a font renderer (adobe acrobat), just to make it entirely equivalent. People who think it's necessary would be the same ones that think free software can't work. Generally not worth arguing with them. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#321669: enigma: Copyright violation for menu.s3m
On Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 05:35:36PM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote: On Sun, 28 Aug 2005, Francesco Poli wrote: On Sun, 28 Aug 2005 20:34:02 +0200 Sven Luther wrote: Erich, applying the GPL to a documentation is ok, but don't you think you are pushing things a bit hard by applying it to a music file too ? I don't think so. Any work can be released under the GPL, IMHO. You can release it, but it may not be possible for anyone else to distribute it if you don't distribute the prefered form for modification (and anything else that is required for other people to distribute the work.) [Of course, there is an argument that the DFSG requires source anyway, but we'll leave that one aside for now.] Soundtracker (and anything similar) modules such as we're dealing with here, like midi files, are usually their own source. As distinct from mp3 or wav files, which usually aren't. For those who don't know, a module is in essence a midi file with embedded instrument samples. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Pre-ITP - LARN and Noah Morgan
On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 09:39:03PM -0700, Alex Perry wrote: Nathan Tenny has the following note on a web page ... http://people.qualcomm.com/ntenny/larn.html As an historical note: I've never really known anything about Noah Morgan, the author of the original Larn and hence, in some sense, the guy from whom I learned C. In looking for the source code, I learned that he died in the late 1990s. That's a problem. In an email on Aug 15 2005, Kevin wrote to Alex: I proceeded on the casual assumption that Noah Morgan and Don Kneller would have no issues with changes being made and posted. They posted to a public forum, and I seem to vaguely recall that their licensing permitted changes and redistribution as long as their original copyright statements were preserved. I never heard anything from anyone to the contrary, but that doesn't mean that it was OK. Accordingly, we believe Noah and Don's intentions met DFSG. The problem is that Noah's intentions are no longer relevent. The decision falls to his heirs, whoever they may be. You need to find them and get a license from them; this may be difficult as they might not have an internet presence or even know that they hold the copyright on this thing. There's a good chance they won't have any idea what free software is. If you can't find an explicit license from him, they're the only ones who can let this thing be distributed at all. Also, if this is all in the US, the heirs *might* be able to revoke any existing license, so you should really contact them regardless (this is an untested legal theory which has become popular over there in recent years). -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Pre-ITP - LARN and Noah Morgan
On Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 05:01:29PM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In an email on Aug 15 2005, Kevin wrote to Alex: I proceeded on the casual assumption that Noah Morgan and Don Kneller would have no issues with changes being made and posted. They posted to a public forum, and I seem to vaguely recall that their licensing permitted changes and redistribution as long as their original copyright statements were preserved. I never heard anything from anyone to the contrary, but that doesn't mean that it was OK. Accordingly, we believe Noah and Don's intentions met DFSG. The problem is that Noah's intentions are no longer relevent. The I read here that (somebody recalls that) he distributed the code with a free (even if not attached) license, so whatever his heirs want to do is not relevant. WHAT TO DO: - Get a clue - Read better It says that some other person (thusly hearsay) said that they vaguely recall (thusly unsure) seeing a license that seemed freeish. That's an awful long way from being a license we can review. Also, as I said in the mail which you replied to without reading, if they're in the US then the heirs might have a say in the matter anyway (if they aren't, ask a local lawyer, inheritence law isn't even remotely similar in different countries). And I'm not going to repeat myself again when you reply to this mail without reading it either, so just assume I repost this reply to it. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Rules for submitting licenses for review
On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 12:49:57PM +0100, Ricardo Gladwell wrote: On 22 Aug 2005 10:48:13 GMT, MJ Ray [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I wonder if the freeculture.org groups are good for this? You will find a range of opinions there, but other than the anti-commercial strand, it's not that different most of the time. I actually find few people agree that the freedoms that apply to software should similarly apply to other types of work, especially digital works such as documents, images, etc. Only debian-legal really seems to take such a stance Plus the Debian project as a whole. We already had that GR. You lost, badly. Oh, and that whole creative commons mob. Yeah. Real few people. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Rules for submitting licenses for review
On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 06:09:36PM +0100, Ricardo Gladwell wrote: 1) they consider the OGL to be similar to how Linux is licensed. I think this is a dubious claim It's so vague that you can claim it about just about anything. Windows is licensed in a similar manner to Linux because the license permits you to run a copy on your computer. 'similar' doesn't really mean anything when talking about licenses. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: May be non-copyrighted documment included in main?
On Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 08:17:21AM -0700, Sean Kellogg wrote: But like I said, the law in the States (and this may not be the case elsewhere) is that when you create a derivative work you are engaged in some kind of copying. AFAIK this quirk is unique to US law. Commonwealth and EU law are both structured differently. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Font and hinting problem
On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 10:25:43AM +1000, roucaries bastien wrote: i want to package metatype1 for debian this program use postscript program that is really short and copyrighted by adobe. The problem it's that if I rewrite this 3 lines they will always look like the original If there is no other sensible way to write the function then it's not copyrightable. But be pretty damned sure of that before taking advantage of it. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: FAIwiki Copyrights
On Fri, Aug 05, 2005 at 09:29:45PM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote: Francesco Poli wrote: Version 2.5 licenses feature *some* little improvements, but they do not solve, AFAICT, all the issues that were found out in 2.0 ones. However, the problem is well in hand. Debian is working with the CC people on a draft new version (3.0?) and it appears that there are no irreconcilable differences; the next version should be DFSG-free. So if you put 2.5 or later I guess you'll probably be OK soon I'm not sure that's really valid. CC licenses don't have an upgrade clause. Go with the MIT license unless you've got a *really* good reason not to. If you want a CC license, sit and wait, this will be fixed sometime. Hopefully by the end of the year. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: zsnes belonging to main instead of contrib (was: Re: RFS: tvbrowser -- TV-Browser is a java-based TV guide)
On Sat, Aug 06, 2005 at 06:07:19PM +0200, Philipp Kern wrote: On Aug 6, 2005, at 5:22 PM, Andrew Saunders wrote: So even if you managed to build it entirely with free tools at some later date, this issue alone would relegate it to contrib until suitably free data is available - or at least, that's been the current practice for e.g. emulators such as zsnes which require non-free roms. I still disagree as zsnes does not *require* non-free ROMs. One could write a free ROM, and one presenting the Debian logo is provided. It does not depend on any non-free system ROM to run correctly. There is also a bug report about this: #313137. What's debian-legal's view on this? I don't believe there have ever been any significant objections to this notion. But I'm not willing to argue in its defense. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: RFS: tvbrowser -- TV-Browser is a java-based TV guide
On Sat, Aug 06, 2005 at 10:59:08PM +0100, Andrew Saunders wrote: In the meantime I've found something about the copyrighted files from sun. Actually these files are part of the official j2sdk! The contens of win/include seems to be just a copy of my /usr/lib/j2sdk1.5-sun/include. But I have no idea how to treat this information. Does this mean, that these files can be treated like our gifs, or do they block a distribution into debian? In order to distribute any part of Sun's j2sdk you have to agree that (iii) you do not distribute additional software intended to replace any component(s) of the Software. Since Debian distributes and encourages free replacements such as Kaffe, GCJ and SableVM, no part of j2sdk can be distributed by the Project at all, even from non-free. Last I checked you can't distribute parts of Sun's java anyway, only the *precise* installer files provided by Sun. You're not even allowed to stuff the installer inside a .deb package. Blackdown had to get explicit permission from Sun to distribute their version. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: BitTorrent Open Source License (Proposed Changes)
On Sun, Jul 31, 2005 at 04:04:53PM -0400, Joe Smith wrote: For that reason, A non-lawyer is equally suited to point out potential wording problems in a contract as a lawyer. I don't believe anybody has ever disputed this. It would be kinda silly, since that's what we do around here all the time. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: BitTorrent Open Source License (Proposed Changes)
On Sat, Jul 30, 2005 at 05:20:40PM -0700, Sean Kellogg wrote: On Saturday 30 July 2005 04:38 pm, Andrew Suffield wrote: On Sat, Jul 30, 2005 at 08:55:33AM -0700, Sean Kellogg wrote: Hmm... Personally, I'm not convinced that venue clauses are non-free. But if they are willing to drop a venue requirement, that's great for users of Debian! I'm surprised that folks on this list are comfortable with such strong choice-of-law provisions. Again, I don't believe such clauses are non-free, but I believe I've heard the argument made before. (A license has got to be interpreted under laws somewhere... might as well establish the laws prior to the agreement instead of fighting it out in court.) The issue isn't precisely the construct, but rather writing the license in such a way as to massively and unfairly benefit the license holder at the expense of the user - that's hardly in the spirit of a free license. The point of a free license, after all, is to *give* stuff away. Not to extract payment in some form. (To forestall the inevitable trolls: the GPL adds restrictions in order to directly further the cause of giving stuff away, not to benefit the licensor, except insofar as he benefits from the improvements to society as a whole). Choice of law provisions are thusly fine so long as they don't choose laws that strongly favour the license holder. Locations with properly functioning justice systems are generally okay. Crazy tinpot dictatorships probably aren't. Choice of venue clauses are a problem because being forced to travel halfway around the world to defend yourself against an entirely spurious claim is hardly reasonable, and so they are essentially a license to harass the user at whim. Like the pet-a-cat license, only worse. I can sue you, right now, right here in my home State of Washington for any spurious claim I so deem. I don't need a choice of venue clause to do that. That's your own US-law perversion; it doesn't affect me, since I neither live in the US nor have any intention to ever set foot in the country. I'm well aware of it and I simply don't care about it. Claiming that a license provision is okay because it's no worse than base US law is offensive, at best. As best I can tell, the choice of law clauses here are extremely right-wing but not actually favorable to either party. Where the hell do you get off calling the U.S. Civ Pro rules extremely right-wing? Aside from the fact that all US law is pretty right-wing from the perspective of those of us who live in the free world (especially socialist countries like mine), they've added loser-pays, excluded jury trials, and overridden bias-against-licensor. That sounds right-wing to me. Heck, this whole concept of locking down the details of the process is a right-wing one. This is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-Right_politics: * Fair or moral outcomes (left) versus fair and correct processes (right). All classic liberalism is process-based, the free market is the best example. Robert Nozick is one of the 20th century theorists who emphasised this distinction between historical and end-result principles (see Anarchy, State, and Utopia, New York, 1974, pp. 153-155). Among the politicians who support this distinction is Australian Labor Party ex-leader Mark Latham. What's the concern here? The GPL only requires that I provide a source distribution method for three years (clause 3(b)) We don't consider clauses 3b or 3c to be free. We require distribution under 3a to be possible, in which case the license is free (since the licensee can use 3a and therefore be exempt from the others). I believe this was actually an issue on one occasion, although I don't recall the details. (Obviously, the GPL doesn't require you provide source for three years). Debian has determined that clauses of the GPL are non-free? That's outrageous. Deal with it, there's all sorts of ways to abuse the GPL such that it becomes non-free. Reiser would be one of the more notorious cases. I don't believe there are any licenses so simple that they haven't been abused by somebody to the point of being non-free, except maybe the do-whatever-the-fuck-you-want license. Especially the line about complex licenses being done by a lawyer. What exactly do you think I am? An undergrad law student. Letting law undergrads write licenses is at least as bad as letting CS undergrads write code (and CS students don't have to undergo further training before they can practice). And lawyers who've just passed their vocational qualification don't normally get allowed to write important license/contract text by the practice they join, until they've acquired a considerable amount of experience. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org
Re: BitTorrent Open Source License (Proposed Changes)
On Sat, Jul 30, 2005 at 08:55:33AM -0700, Sean Kellogg wrote: Hmm... Personally, I'm not convinced that venue clauses are non-free. But if they are willing to drop a venue requirement, that's great for users of Debian! I'm surprised that folks on this list are comfortable with such strong choice-of-law provisions. Again, I don't believe such clauses are non-free, but I believe I've heard the argument made before. (A license has got to be interpreted under laws somewhere... might as well establish the laws prior to the agreement instead of fighting it out in court.) The issue isn't precisely the construct, but rather writing the license in such a way as to massively and unfairly benefit the license holder at the expense of the user - that's hardly in the spirit of a free license. The point of a free license, after all, is to *give* stuff away. Not to extract payment in some form. (To forestall the inevitable trolls: the GPL adds restrictions in order to directly further the cause of giving stuff away, not to benefit the licensor, except insofar as he benefits from the improvements to society as a whole). Choice of law provisions are thusly fine so long as they don't choose laws that strongly favour the license holder. Locations with properly functioning justice systems are generally okay. Crazy tinpot dictatorships probably aren't. Choice of venue clauses are a problem because being forced to travel halfway around the world to defend yourself against an entirely spurious claim is hardly reasonable, and so they are essentially a license to harass the user at whim. Like the pet-a-cat license, only worse. As best I can tell, the choice of law clauses here are extremely right-wing but not actually favorable to either party. What's the concern here? The GPL only requires that I provide a source distribution method for three years (clause 3(b)) We don't consider clauses 3b or 3c to be free. We require distribution under 3a to be possible, in which case the license is free (since the licensee can use 3a and therefore be exempt from the others). I believe this was actually an issue on one occasion, although I don't recall the details. (Obviously, the GPL doesn't require you provide source for three years). -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: BitTorrent Open Source License (Proposed Changes)
On Sat, Jul 30, 2005 at 04:23:51PM -0700, Sean Kellogg wrote: Oh, wow... here my thought was people felt six months wasn't long enough... not too long. I suppose that certainly could be a problem for the manner in which Debian distributes, however, I don't think it is a DFSG problem. It's a fee. Pet a cat, again. Additionally, it's impossible for us to accomplish with the current archive structure, so it's non-distributable even in non-free as far as we're concerned. I think you would be better off changing the language from available to distribute to clear up an uncertainty. I think that the phrasing of complex license clauses should be done by lawyers. We don't need another repeat of the Artistic debacle. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: LGPL module linked with a GPL lib
On Thu, Jul 28, 2005 at 09:19:15AM -0700, Ken Arromdee wrote: On Thu, 28 Jul 2005, Andrew Suffield wrote: Anyway, the person who recombines the film and track, in the case of dynamic linking, is the *USER*, in the process of using the program, and copyrights protection do not apply at that moment, as per 17USC. You Are Wrong. Under US law, this is Contributory Infringement, which carries a full array of jail terms. SCOTUS just upheld it against Grokster a few weeks ago. Providing an automated system for users to perform infringing acts, with the sole intent of aiding them in performing those acts, is the same as doing them yourself. But that doesn't apply in the case of automatic systems for users to do the link. The GPL allows users to do what they want privately, so the users aren't performing infringing acts themselves. So your theory is that this is okay because users cannot ever possibly do anything aside from private use and other actions that the GPL doesn't restrict? I'm afraid there's a gaping hole in that one... -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: generated source files, GPL and DFSG
On Thu, Jul 28, 2005 at 11:47:58PM +0200, Francesco Poli wrote: On Thu, 28 Jul 2005 15:00:29 +0100 Steve McIntyre wrote: Florian Weimer wrote: [...] The GR did not change the wording of the DFSG at all. However, it's clear that a significant shift took place in SC interpretation, from a foggy definition of program to a more dogmatic everything we ship is software approach. Our interpretation of the DFSG must reflect this change. The only way to do this is to interpret progarm in the broadest possible sense. Please, no. We've already had long, tedious discussions about what software means. Don't go trying to change the meaning of program too. If you think that the places where we currently talk about program are unclear and should say software, then propose a GR to get them changed. We ship lots of things that are NOT programs... Yes, I think it's time to propose a GR to do a s/program/work/ in the DFSG. Since IANADD, I cannot propose GRs, but I hope that some DDs will help. It's not quite that simple; you can't just change that bit alone. I'm working on something here. More on this later. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: LGPL module linked with a GPL lib
On Thu, Jul 28, 2005 at 08:04:40AM -0400, Michael Poole wrote:
Andrew Suffield writes:
On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 02:42:35PM -0300, Humberto Massa Guimar?es wrote:
Static linking can *not* create a derived work, because it is an
automatic process. Poster case: is hello, generated from hello.c:
#include stdio.h
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
printf(Hello\n);
return 0;
}
a derivative work of something it's (statically) linked to?
The answer is no, because derivative works, as intelligent
transformations, can only appear when you *create* a work.
This is a FAQ, or more precisely something that people frequently get
wrong. The derivative work was created when you wrote the source code
that needs to be statically linked. Myopically staring at the build
process does nothing to change this.
Comparison to
Grokster et al doesn't hold
Obviously you didn't read the mail you were replying to. Can't see any
point in writing more.
--
.''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
: :' : http://www.debian.org/ |
`. `' |
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Re: LGPL module linked with a GPL lib
On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 02:42:35PM -0300, Humberto Massa Guimar?es wrote:
Static linking can *not* create a derived work, because it is an
automatic process. Poster case: is hello, generated from hello.c:
#include stdio.h
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
printf(Hello\n);
return 0;
}
a derivative work of something it's (statically) linked to?
The answer is no, because derivative works, as intelligent
transformations, can only appear when you *create* a work.
This is a FAQ, or more precisely something that people frequently get
wrong. The derivative work was created when you wrote the source code
that needs to be statically linked. Myopically staring at the build
process does nothing to change this.
Additionally, when linking statically, you are performing literal
copying of the original work into the target binary, so the GPL kicks
in there too.
Anyway, the person who recombines the film and track, in the
case of dynamic linking, is the *USER*, in the process of using the
program, and copyrights protection do not apply at that moment, as
per 17USC.
You Are Wrong. Under US law, this is Contributory Infringement, which
carries a full array of jail terms. SCOTUS just upheld it against
Grokster a few weeks ago. Providing an automated system for users to
perform infringing acts, with the sole intent of aiding them in
performing those acts, is the same as doing them yourself.
The rest of the world isn't quite so crazy, but then it doesn't get
into this ridiculous word game in the first place.
--
.''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
: :' : http://www.debian.org/ |
`. `' |
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Re: LGPL module linked with a GPL lib
On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 09:17:25AM -0500, Jeff Licquia wrote: On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 11:59 +0200, Loïc Minier wrote: GStreamer's build process builds separate binaries for the various plugins, these are then dlopened when requested. I would personnally think that installing only Debian's GStreamer packages that are linked to LGPL libraries doesn't make your GStreamer installation / packages GPL (that is the build process has nothing to do with the resulting packages). I would even thing that installing GStreamer plugins packages which link to GPL libraries don't make your installation nor your running GStreamer applications GPL (that is only dlopening() something GPL makes the whole program in memory GPL, while it remains in memory). In a technical sense, you're right, in that each binary retains its separate copyright status. Most people, however, are concerned about the restrictions effectively placed on them more than about the specific status of any particular binary. I think it'd be a stretch to say that this prohibits proprietary gstreamer plugins, but I doubt you could *include* them in a gstreamer distribution. Third-party ones should still be okay. I see two ways in which this practically effects people using Debian. One, Debian could decide to package a plugin linking to a free but GPL-incompatible library, such as OpenSSL. Two, others might want to add a few proprietary plugins on top of Debian and distribute the result. So, I'd say that the former is probably prohibited and the latter is probably allowed. Incorporating proprietary plugins into Debian is somewhere around the borderline case, but I can't see that ever being an issue. This seems worth mentioning in the copyright file, even if the license itself doesn't change. Yeah, as far as the above goes. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: generated source files, GPL and DFSG
On Fri, Jul 22, 2005 at 03:47:41PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: On Fri, Jul 22, 2005 at 11:56:01PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote: * Andreas Barth: Actually, the DFSG says: | 2. Source Code | | The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in | source code as well as compiled form. Obviously e.g. fonts are no programms, even if they are in main. It's clear from the context (and previous discussion) that this has to be interpreted as software. No, it isn't. Considering we went through all the effort of a GR to amend the DFSG and this still says program, not software, I don't see how you can claim it *has* to be read as software. (And there are fewer instances of the word software in the DFSG after the revision than there were before, anyway...) The DFSG was never amended. The text has not changed. This is purely because I didn't want to lump two complex revisions together, and it carries no implications about the intended meaning. The relevant change in 2004-03 was to eliminate all uses of the word software from the SC (except as part of the compound noun free software), on the basis that it had always meant everything but some people had difficulty understanding this and we got into pointless debates because of it. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: generated source files, GPL and DFSG
On Sat, Jul 23, 2005 at 11:24:12AM +0200, Andreas Barth wrote: * Glenn Maynard ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [050723 11:15]: (CC's trimmed.) On Sat, Jul 23, 2005 at 09:21:04AM +0200, Andreas Barth wrote: It's clear from the context (and previous discussion) that this has to be interpreted as software. I disagree with that. As there were editorial changes that had as declared goal to replace any such places with the real meaning, and this was not touched, it has to be obviously interpreted as program. If you really want to deal in unconvincing semantic arguments, consider that the clause says the program, which indicates that it's assuming the whole of the DFSG is only being applied to programs. Since GR2004-003 established that the DFSG applies to everything in Debian, program can only consistently be interpreted here as everything in Debian. Why didn't the GR then change the wording to program? Because this word is in the DFSG, not the SC. Please stop making up ridiculous interpretations. 2004-03 was modifying the SC. It did not modify the DFSG. That's all there is to see here. And before anybody starts making up more daft ideas about why the DFSG wasn't changed, it was for one reason and one reason alone: Updating the SC took quite enough of my time, I didn't want to do the DFSG as well right then. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: generated source files, GPL and DFSG
On Sat, Jul 23, 2005 at 12:22:34AM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: Florian Weimer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: * Matthew Garrett: There's two main issues here. 1) Does everything in main have to include the preferred form of modification? I don't believe so, We had a GR that is usually interpreted in a manner which disagrees with you. We had a GR that stated that everything in main must include source code. Actually that's a myth. We have never had a GR on this subject. We did have a *release manager* who stated this, at one point. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: generated source files, GPL and DFSG
On Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 04:52:23PM +0200, Bas Wijnen wrote: First of all, GFingerPoken is released under the GPL. GFingerPoken uses xpms for the graphics. Those files are included in the distribution as .h files, and included directly into the source. Some of them, however, were generated from other files by means of pov-ray. Those files are not in the distribution, but they can be downloaded from the same site as a different tarball. The previous maintainer packaged only the distribution tarball, and used the (generated) .h-files for the compilation of the program. Technically, that is not problematic at all. However, when I found that (some of) the graphics had a source from which they could be compiled, I concluded two things: - To satisfy the GPL, the source for those graphics needs to be distributed as well, so it must be in the source package. - I don't know if it's actually written anywhere, but I thought everything that has source and can be compiled should be compiled at package build time. This means the .h-files have to be regenerated (with pov-ray, in this case). The DFSG doesn't actually require that we ship source to everything - just that it be available. That's not an excuse though, since policy *does* require we ship source to everything. Now that's where the problem starts: pov-ray is in non-free, so any package with a Build-depends: on it must be in contrib (if it is itself free). I don't like to have non-free software on my machine, so I didn't like that idea. I thought of two solutions for that: create new artwork, or do some editing on the existing artwork, which cannot be done automatically. The latter would make it technically impossible to generate the result from source, which would probably remove the requirement to do so. However, that just felt too much like going against the gist of the policy, so I chose not to do that. Yes, that wouldn't really benefit anybody. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I-D ACTION:draft-bradner-rfc-extracts-01.txt]
On Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 09:35:54AM +0200, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote: There have been many debates on the freeness of IETF RFCs so here is an opportunity to influence it. http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-bradner-rfc-extracts-01.txt This is a distribution license - which is nice, because lots of RFCs aren't presently distributable at all - but it's not a license to modify, so that's not very useful. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: MPlayer revisited
On Sun, Jun 12, 2005 at 03:25:19PM +, MJ Ray wrote: Diego Biurrun [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I surely hope we're not at the point where constructive dialog has become impossible. I ask all of you to judge my words on their merit and not past statements made by other people. I think we're not, but I don't know whether either mplayer developers or debian developers can convince a ftpmaster (which is where this tab stops) about this issue, or we have to wait for a legal brain to comment. Specifically, it doesn't help that mplayer developers have pretty much run their credibility into the ground by now. After countless rounds of It's free now! Here's six more blatant abuses, three of which you already knew about [references] Fuck off, I'm not overly surprised that people are disinclined to believe them. Unfortunately we don't have a good solution to the problem of dealing with a package where upstream are untrustworthy lying bastards. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Is this license DFSG free?
On Sat, Jun 11, 2005 at 07:17:38PM -0700, Sean Kellogg wrote: On Saturday 11 June 2005 05:10 pm, Måns Rullgård wrote: Anthony DeRobertis [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Sean Kellogg wrote: You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change. Doesn't this violate the Dissident test and cause troubles for our poor totalitarian state citizen? No, because the following statement is allowed by the GPL, and does not reveal the identity of the dissident: This file was changed on December 10, 2004. Whether that's allowed by the GPL depends on the interpretation of the phrase stating that you changed the files. Agreed. The setence is ambigous if broken down sufficiently. However, if the Anthony's language is sufficient, it strikes me that the GPL is way too verbose. All you would need the GPL to say to require such a limited changelog would be provide a notice of the date of any change without reference to you. It is interesting the GPL-FAQ has nothing to say about the topic. We have a standing opinion from the FSF that the information contained in a cvs log is sufficient for this purpose, and the identity of the person making the change need not be disclosed. The GPL does lie right on the line, but it lies on the 'safe' line. From a certain perspective, you could say that the GPL is the delimiting mark (at least, we've never found anything more restrictive than the GPL in this respect which was still free, to my knowledge - that doesn't mean it *can't* exist, but it probably doesn't). -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Trademark question
On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 01:40:12PM +0200, nodata wrote: Probably an easy one.. SYBASE, INC. TRADEMARKS (Effective March 22, 2004) APT Workbench(tm) APT-Build(tm) problem? I can't imagine that we would care, and they certainly don't have any basis for claim against us. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [Debtags-devel] Re: Creating a Debtags 'license' facet
On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 12:17:42PM +0200, Enrico Zini wrote: On Fri, Jun 03, 2005 at 10:06:48PM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote: On Fri, Jun 03, 2005 at 04:20:05PM +0200, Enrico Zini wrote: You've got a problem with this one, because licenses can be combined conjunctively and disjunctively. So a package might be both entirely under foo and entirely under bar (foo || bar), or it might be partially under foo and partially under bar (foo bar). If that is the only problem, a package can be tagged with more than one tag even from the same facet, which would be good enough to categorise your two examples. Imagine a package that can be distributed if you meet the terms of: - the GPL - both the MIT license and the 4-clause BSD license, simultaneously - both the MIT license and the Artistic license, simultaneously How would you tag this, so as to capture all this information? -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: New 'Public Domain' Licence
On Fri, Jun 10, 2005 at 12:50:03AM -0700, Sean Kellogg wrote: On Thursday 09 June 2005 11:10 pm, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: Andrew Suffield wrote: The primary threat is not from the heirs (although that is a threat, and you don't have control over all your heirs - your parents and cousins can qualify), If you're worried about your heirs revoking your copyright licences, I suggest talking to the FSF or someone like them; you could make the FSF the heir to your copyrights. No, your parents and cousins CANNOT qualify, blood relation is not enough under the statute. The right of termination flows from you, to your spouse, then to your children, and final to your estate's executor. Sounds like a US perversion to me. I doubt many places have weird laws that override normal inheritance law. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [Debtags-devel] Re: Creating a Debtags 'license' facet
On Fri, Jun 10, 2005 at 07:22:59PM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote: On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 12:17:42PM +0200, Enrico Zini wrote: On Fri, Jun 03, 2005 at 10:06:48PM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote: On Fri, Jun 03, 2005 at 04:20:05PM +0200, Enrico Zini wrote: You've got a problem with this one, because licenses can be combined conjunctively and disjunctively. So a package might be both entirely under foo and entirely under bar (foo || bar), or it might be partially under foo and partially under bar (foo bar). If that is the only problem, a package can be tagged with more than one tag even from the same facet, which would be good enough to categorise your two examples. Imagine a package that can be distributed if you meet the terms of: Uhh, unclear, this should be read as: EITHER - the GPL OR - both the MIT license and the 4-clause BSD license, simultaneously OR - both the MIT license and the Artistic license, simultaneously -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: rfc non freeness - could a summary of the issue be made ?
On Wed, Jun 08, 2005 at 02:13:31AM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote: Alban Browaeys wrote: Is there a consensus about what make it non free Yes. They don't give you permission to make a new document, derived from an RFC but renamed and describing a different standard. (Unless you submit it as an RFC, which is often inappropriate, and would be a non-free submit to upstream requirement in any case). Notably, you can't include any text from them in programs you write. Including example code. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: New 'Public Domain' Licence
On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 04:58:53PM -0400, Jeff King wrote: _Probably_ a Dutch judge would treat the above statement as a license that means do whatever you want, since he's supposed to reconstruct the intention of the author from such a vague statement. And do whatever you want seems the intention. Yes, it is the intention. How about a license like: Do whatever you want. The only argument I have heard against this is that you (or your heirs) may later say Oh, but I didn't really mean *anything*. Which seems silly to me, but perhaps that's why I'm a programmer and not a lawyer. Lawyers are pretty silly people, yes. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Creating a Debtags 'license' facet
On Fri, Jun 03, 2005 at 04:20:05PM +0200, Enrico Zini wrote: in the Debtags development mailing list, we are discussing about the creation of a set of categories (which we call 'facet') about licenses, and we would like to include debian-legal in the discussion. The idea is to allow people to query packages such as LGPL libraries to edit images. We can do libraries to edit images already, but we don't yet have categories for licenses. There has been a bit of discussion in the list already that you probably want to read: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debtags-devel/2005-June/000406.html More informations about Debtags and its way of classifying software can be found in the paper I submitted for Debconf5: http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/paper-debtags.html We'd be glad if you had comments to contribute to our discussion. You've got a problem with this one, because licenses can be combined conjunctively and disjunctively. So a package might be both entirely under foo and entirely under bar (foo || bar), or it might be partially under foo and partially under bar (foo bar). And last I checked, debtags wasn't really equipped to express stuff like that. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Creating a Debtags 'license' facet
Yeah, crosspost to -legal from a list that moderates non-subscriber mails, great plan. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: DRAFT: debian-legal summary of the QPL
On Mon, May 23, 2005 at 09:23:57AM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: Brett Parker [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Matthew Garrett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: QPL requirement: if you pass on binaries, you must pass on source to both the recipient and upstream. You claim this is a fee. Well, this is non-free as upstream may have died, and if you can't distribute without distributing to upstream, it makes forking impractical too. If upstream is dead then you're fully knackered though. The clause in question is: If the items are not available to the general public, and the initial developer of the Software requests a copy of the items, then you must supply one. If upstream is dead, it's a bit difficult for them to request a copy. Consider the case where 'upstream' refers to several hundred distinct entities. It's the BSD advertising clause disaster all over again... -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: License question about regexplorer
On Mon, May 23, 2005 at 09:04:52PM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Wait, the QPL (with no additional permission and a choice of venue) is *not* DFSG-free (many long discussions were hold on debian-legal last summer, IIRC). This is just bullshit. A few people thinking it's not free does not make it non-free. But Marco d'Itri defending it means it probably is non-free. Funny how that works. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Trademark license compatibility with GPL and/or DFSG
On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 09:48:25AM -0700, Ken Arromdee wrote: Isn't it always legal to use a trademark to refer to the product in question? If you have a driver for a piece of hardware that has the trademarked name X, it should be legal to name it driver for X. Yes, and there should be no need to use the trademark in any way that requires a license for it. Purely descriptive, accurate use of trademarked terms is always permitted. Just be careful. You can call it driver for bluetooth, since it is. You can't call it bluetooth without permission, since it isn't. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GPL and linking
On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 01:27:54PM +0200, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote: Andrew Suffield [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 05:03:09AM +0200, Jakob Bohm wrote: Note: I am replying only to -legal for now, someone with more firm knowledge than either me or Mr. Edwards should post a proper rebuttal to -devel so Mr. Edwards' arguments will not look undisputed to the broad masses of Debian Developers. You may find it useful to note that I killfiled him a long time ago for endlessly making immensely verbose, fallacious arguments backed up by what appears to be research but on further study turns out to be misstatement of the facts. I'm pretty sure he's a troll. Don't feed the trolls. That's an innovative way to reach consensus: killfile anyone who disagrees. I am stunned by the depth of your inability to read the text which you quote. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: GPL and linking (was: Urgently need GPL compatible libsnmp5-dev replacement :-()
On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 05:03:09AM +0200, Jakob Bohm wrote: Note: I am replying only to -legal for now, someone with more firm knowledge than either me or Mr. Edwards should post a proper rebuttal to -devel so Mr. Edwards' arguments will not look undisputed to the broad masses of Debian Developers. You may find it useful to note that I killfiled him a long time ago for endlessly making immensely verbose, fallacious arguments backed up by what appears to be research but on further study turns out to be misstatement of the facts. I'm pretty sure he's a troll. Don't feed the trolls. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: For thoughts: fair license
On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 10:42:02AM -0700, James William Pye wrote: Besides that, a normal person would probably ask themselves questions such as Does an author have the right to read his/her own works?, well most certainly. I think you are deeply confused as to the nature of copyright. An author only has any 'rights' until the point where he trades them away to somebody else. The author of a commercial software program will not typically have any rights to it at all. It is only by grace of his employer that he can read it. But it'd certainly be clearer in all of them to just say what you mean. When I wish to specify that there are no limits, how can I be more specific than to say, there are no limits? You didn't say that. And you could be more specific by saying what isn't limited. Oh, and this is a big lawyer-bomb. It's fairly easy for some one (or his heirs, etc.) to decide to un-free the work by arguing a limited meaning of the rights granted by authorship. For example, they could argue the only right granted by authorship is to have the work properly attributed, and thus that no permission to do much anything has really been granted. I really don't think so. Well, you lost that court battle. You'd be much better off claiming your ancestor was insane for giving away his intellectual property, and could not have possibly understood what the license meant due to the fact that he spent so many hard hours creating the works, and all those hard hours, for what? For nothing! That's essentially how the argument works, yes. That would make no sense, therefore it doesn't really mean 'all', that was a mistake, it just means some and for a limited time; they didn't intend to deprive their heirs of income. It's ours now. It's worked enough times. 3. Your disclaimer may not be sufficent. IANAL. However, since every disclaimer I have seen produced by a lawyer is much more thorough, I'd guess there is a good reason for that. Sufficient for what precisely? The only thing that I wish to make clear with that disclaimer is that there is no guarantee. I can't think of a more clear way to state it with regards to those works. Lawyers can. Court battles have been fought and lost over such clauses in the past. Your clause merely says that you aren't providing a warranty, this does not affect, eg, statutory rights under UK law. You're still providing the implicit warranty of merchantability, matching the description, and fitness for a given purpose, and you are liable in the limited fashion they imply. Criminally so if a mistake on your part leads to serious injury or loss of life. You'd get a reduced sentence since you only bear partial, limited responsibility, but you *would* be convicted. Leave the lawyer-wrangling to the lawyers. Non-lawyers should not be writing licenses. Permission is hereby granted ... to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights [list of rights], and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions (MIT License) Notice 'without restriction' and 'including without limitation'. The list is there to make the license crystal clear; that is a good thing. It in no way limits the scope of the license grant. Heh, let's treat MIT in like form. deal in the Software? I haven't seen that in my readings of Berne and title 17. No specific definition that I know of. Go buy a legal dictionary. Since you're obsessive-compulsive about US law, which is a common-law country, it's pretty much a waste of time to sit staring at the statute. Common-law countries don't have any basic principles written into the statute at all. So what on earth do they mean, specifically? Does that mean, I can print the material to multiple pieces of rectangular paper and play poker with my buddies without restriction? It's arguably vague. Sure. Who cares? It means all the stuff we care about, plus the vague lunatic stuff that you're so eager to permit. The list of permissions is legally explicit. I can't be bothered to dissect your poor cariacture; it's wrong. Law is not vague fluff, it's a specific language, and you suck at it. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Asking for advice regarding the Sleepy Cat's dbxml license
On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 11:30:02AM +0200, Arnoud Engelfriet wrote: The license is more onerous than the GPL though, since it talks about software that uses the DB software rather than software _based on_ the DB software. There are lots of ways in which you can use the software without creating a derivative work. But that's a minor issue I guess. I believe we have an outstanding clarification on this issue from sleepycat somewhere in the archives. It means the same thing as the GPL, anyway - but don't go copying this license without fixing the wording. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: modification of zlib/libpng license, is this legally usable?
On Wed, Apr 27, 2005 at 07:35:56PM +0200, Anders Bergh wrote: I've modified the zlib/libpng license to be a bit more restrictive for commercial usage.. I would like to get some feedback, It's not free. and I also wonder if it's legally usable. We can sometimes tell you why a license isn't viable. We can never tell you that it *is*. You have to hire a lawyer to do that. For commercial usage these restrictions applies aswell: 4. You must have written permission by the respective copyright holders for using this software. This really means this license is for non-commercial use only. ask us about commercial licenses. Therefore, non-free. Written permission *is* the license; this document has just said that it is not such a license. 5. The usage of this software must be acknowledged somewhere easily accessible for the end user, such as the about box or product documentation. Vague. What's 'usage', 'accessible', and 'end user'? Not that it matters, given #4. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: (DRAFT 3) FAQ on documentation licensing
On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 11:43:33PM -0400, Glenn Maynard wrote: [2] I'm not sure if slander or libel are the relevant laws, here. It depends on the specifics of what you claimed they said. It could also be fraud, or a variety of other jurisdiction-specific things. Not desperately interesting for our purposes. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: (DRAFT 4) FAQ on documentation licensing
On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 02:53:18PM +, MJ Ray wrote: Finally, if there were any reasons to allow such a restriction in documents, these reasons would allow it in programs too. For example, qmail's license forbids distributing modified versions of it, since its author believes that his reputation might suffer if someone distributed a version of qmail with bugs not introduced by him. If restrictions on modification of documents were allowed to save an author's reputation, they would be allowed on programs; this would make qmail free, but due to the DFSG it isn't, so these restrictions cannot be allowed. I think a better example would be the demonstration implementation of a protocol included with a standards document. Java. It's precisely the reason Sun use. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
