Re: Debian packaging and (possible) Eterm license violations
Hi Michael and Justin, Thank you for your help! I've submitted a bug (#359707) and will follow its progress. 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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Debian packaging and (possible) Eterm license violations
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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian packaging and (possible) Eterm license violations
Ed Hill writes: 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. This kind of licensing conflict is a release-critical bug in the package under Debian Policy. The ideal solution for Debian is exactly what you suggested in the bug comments: work with the upstream maintainer to sort out license incompatibilities. Poorer solutions are to change just the Debian package by finding compatibly-licensed alternatives or ripping out the conflicting code. As a purely pedantic note, the enlightenment/eterm CVS browser at SourceForge makes it looks like grkelot.[ch] are under the same BSD-with-advertising license that Michael Jennings' the rest code uses. Not specifically mentioned in the bug report is the (L)GPL incompatibility with the classic advertising clause that is used for the BSD-licensed portions. (If you follow debian-legal, I apologize for cc'ing you directly, but it seemed the more reliable way to get the response through.) Michael Poole -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian packaging and (possible) Eterm license violations
On Mon, 2006-03-27 at 23:10 -0500, Michael Poole wrote: This kind of licensing conflict is a release-critical bug in the package under Debian Policy. The ideal solution for Debian is exactly what you suggested in the bug comments: work with the upstream maintainer to sort out license incompatibilities. Poorer solutions are to change just the Debian package by finding compatibly-licensed alternatives or ripping out the conflicting code. Hi Michael, Please pardon my Debian-ignorance, but where is the correct place to file this bug? I want to get the bug officially noticed in part because upstream has said (and I'm paraphrasing here): Debian has no problem with the current Eterm license terms so you shouldn't, either. As a purely pedantic note, the enlightenment/eterm CVS browser at SourceForge makes it looks like grkelot.[ch] are under the same BSD-with-advertising license that Michael Jennings' the rest code uses. Not specifically mentioned in the bug report is the (L)GPL incompatibility with the classic advertising clause that is used for the BSD-licensed portions. Yes, true. (If you follow debian-legal, I apologize for cc'ing you directly, but it seemed the more reliable way to get the response through.) No worries! I appreciate your help! 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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian packaging and (possible) Eterm license violations
Ed Hill writes: On Mon, 2006-03-27 at 23:10 -0500, Michael Poole wrote: This kind of licensing conflict is a release-critical bug in the package under Debian Policy. The ideal solution for Debian is exactly what you suggested in the bug comments: work with the upstream maintainer to sort out license incompatibilities. Poorer solutions are to change just the Debian package by finding compatibly-licensed alternatives or ripping out the conflicting code. Hi Michael, Please pardon my Debian-ignorance, but where is the correct place to file this bug? The email method at http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting is probably the easiest way to submit it. Judging from packages.debian.org, Debian's current version of the eterm package is 0.9.3-1, and the bug would be of serious Severity:. Michael Poole -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian packaging and (possible) Eterm license violations
Ed Hill [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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 I don't know the author at all, but from his mail to this bug I don't think you can't blame him. His wording is inappropriate, but he has a point: If every single file in a source tarball has a license information, a separate LICENSE or COPYING file is nice, but not necessary at all. The other issue is a question of rpm/Fedora packaging policy which I can't comment on. Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX)
