Hi folks,
I'm an occasional Debian user and, while doing package reviews for
Fedora Extras, stumbled into the Eterm mix-of-source-licenses situation
described below.
The following email was sent to the Debian Eterm maintainer. I'm
forwarding it to this list because I've not (yet) received a response
and because I'm curious what right thing to do is within the Debian
packaging rules (or conventions or...?) for cases such as this one.
thanks,
Ed
Forwarded Message
From: Ed Hill [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: debian maintainer for Eterm -- license questions
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 22:55:32 -0500
Hi Laurence,
My name is Ed and I'm a volunteer in the Fedora project. Please pardon
the personal email -- I located your name as the current debian packager
of Eterm. Its come to my attention that various files within Eterm seem
to have conflicting license terms as described at:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=182173
which is a review for possible inclusion of Eterm within the Fedora
Extras repository. In a nutshell, the various Eterm source files
include the following licenses: BSD-like, LGPL, GPL, and at least one
[src/netdisp.c] that essentially says this code cannot be sold for
profit which violates the Debian Social Contract (DFSG #1).
Were you aware of these conflicting licenses? Have any of them been
re-licensed (hopefully to something that doesn't restrict for-profit
sale!) by the original authors? Or, can the software be built and used
without shipping these files?
I'm asking because the main upstream author (Michael Jennings) seems to
think that the Fedora Guidelines (which are in some ways quite similar
to the much-older DSC) are silly rules which discriminate against
packages for no real reason:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=182175
and has not been particularly helpful as we try to sort out the overall
terms. Ultimately, we're hoping Eterm can be included in FE but its
looking doubtful.
Any help, insight, etc. that you can provide will be appreciated!
thanks,
Ed
--
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
office: MIT Dept. of EAPS; Rm 54-1424; 77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
emails: [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED]
URLs:http://web.mit.edu/eh3/http://eh3.com/
phone: 617-253-0098
fax: 617-253-4464
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