Re: When should -legal contact maintainers [Was: Re: Question for candidate Robinson]
On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 12:23:26AM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote: [This is wildly OT for -vote, MFT set to -legal and CC:'ed, please follow up there or privately.] On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, Wouter Verhelst wrote: On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 12:52:20AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote: Still, debian-legal should inform the maintainers and invite them to take part of the discussion when examining packages which have been in main for years. I think he's right about this. For one thing, as he just explained, he got upset precisely because he wasn't informed; it's reasonable to assume that the way in which his discussion would have been performed would have been 'slightly' different had he been informed in time. I *do* think it is good practice for d-legal contributors to inform a packages' maintainer if they are discussing its license; we do the same with other types of bugs. If -legal is specifically discussing a license of a package, the maintainer is generally informed[1] when the discussion is actually Can be, and if so it is nice, but it was not in this case, since the first mention i had was that consensus was reached and my package should move to non-free. And it was a nominal discussion about my package. And again, the mail saying the above was CCed to debian-legal, and nobody there bothered to correct the misconception. happening. However, (almost) no one bothers to inform the maintainers when general discussion of a license is occuring, in the first part because most of the discussion isn't particularly useful to most maintainers, and secondly, because people have better things to do[1] than track down which packages are covered by a license when the critical issues (if any) haven't been discussed or discerned yet. In the latter stages of the discussion, if there really are issues with a license that packages in Debian are using, bugs are typically opened against the packages, ideally with a short summary of the specific issues that the license has, and suggestions for what the maintainer can do to fix the license. (And quite often offers of help in explaining the problems to upstream as well.) And in this case, suggestion was ask upstream to GPL his software or dual licence, as trolltech did for Qt. not even bothering to examine the package in questionand noticing that none of the QPLed part of the package was indeed a library, and thus had no GPL-interaction problems. This shot first ask later attitude based on half informed guesses and backed by the fanatism of the debian-legal posters was what mostly irritated me back then, and also what makes me believe that debian-legal is not to be thrusthed on licencing issues, which makes ti totally useless. As far as the analogy to normal bugs goes, the preliminary discussion is generally on the order of is this really a bug? as is typically seen on -devel. [Or, in the extreme case, figuring out whether mass bug filing is sane.] Surely no maintainer expects to be notified every time someone asks on -user, -devel (or $DEITY forbid, IRC[3]) whether specific behavior from a package constitutes a bug. no, but maintainers get over-angry when people modify the seveirty of one of their bugs they have been ignoring for age, no ? And this reaction seems to be backed up by the powers that are, and a real analogy to the please ask upstream to GPL his software or we will recomend ftp-masters to remove it from main kind of request. Friendly, Sven Luther -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: When should -legal contact maintainers [Was: Re: Question for candidate Robinson]
On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, Sven Luther wrote: On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 12:23:26AM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote: If -legal is specifically discussing a license of a package, the maintainer is generally informed[1] it was not in this case, since the first mention i had was that consensus was reached and my package should move to non-free. In this particular case, the package and license combination that brought up the QPL was libcwd (#251983).[1] To be honest, no one seems to have equated the libcwd discussion about QPL being non-free with the ocaml discussion about the QPL being GPL incompatible until Brian Sniffen brought it up,[2] and since you're in the Maintainer: field on ocaml, you were notified. [This isn't particularly surprising as it's almost impossible to figure out what licenses packages are under in Debian in an automated fashion.] In the latter stages of the discussion, if there really are issues with a license that packages in Debian are using, bugs are typically opened against the packages, ideally with a short summary of the specific issues that the license has, and suggestions for what the maintainer can do to fix the license. (And quite often offers of help in explaining the problems to upstream as well.) And in this case, suggestion was ask upstream to GPL his software or dual licence, as trolltech did for Qt. not even bothering to examine the package in questionand noticing that none of the QPLed part of the package was indeed a library, and thus had no GPL-interaction problems. Dual licensing under the QPL and GPL (or as actually suggested, QPL + LGPL[3]) would have solved both the DFSG freedom issues with the QPL, and the ocaml emacs binding issues of #227159. It may not be the optimal solution for ocaml, but it would have solved the immediate problems. Surely no maintainer expects to be notified every time someone asks on -user, -devel (or $DEITY forbid, IRC[3]) whether specific behavior from a package constitutes a bug. no, but maintainers get over-angry when people modify the seveirty of one of their bugs they have been ignoring for age, no ? I'd hope that maintainers wouldn't get angry,[4] and instead be willing to help discuss the issues (or lack thereof) that make the changed serverity of the bug reasonable or unreasonable. After all, it's not like we're making up these issues purely to spite maintainers. In most cases, reasonable people have examined the issues, discussed them, and felt there was enough of a problem to warrant bothering a package maintainer about it. After all, things change, and a bug that was normal severity today may end up being RC tomorrow. And this reaction seems to be backed up by the powers that are, and a real analogy to the please ask upstream to GPL his software or we will recomend ftp-masters to remove it from main kind of request. I'm afraid I cannot parse what you're trying to say here. Don Armstrong 1: http://people.debian.org/~terpstra/message/20040709.215918.1224a82f.en.html 2: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=227159msg=65 3: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=227159msg=41 4: But then, bts ping-pong doesn't happen because maintainers are always calm... -- What I can't stand is the feeling that my brain is leaving me for someone more interesting. http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
