On Sat, 2009-04-25 at 21:41 -0400,
saulgo...@flashingtwelve.brickfilms.com wrote:
Quoting Jo Shields direct...@apebox.org:
Why am I only hearing about licensing concerns regarding a package I
maintain when reading about it on a personal attack website? I'd usually
think that a package's maintainer should be included in such
discussions, assuming you're interested in their input.
Please remember that debian-legal is an advice forum, and in no way has
a formal role regarding license compliance - that role belongs to
ftp-master.
I was not aware that debian-legal was a personal attack website. :)
It's not. But BoycottNovell is, and the first I heard about your posting
to debian-legal was there - as opposed to being CC'd in as the package's
maintainer.
But seriously, I welcome your input and appreciate your response.
You've addressed many of the concerns I raised and it would seem I had
indeed garnered some misconceptions from the Debianwiki Project page.
No animosity was intended in my pointing out inaccuracies on that
page, nor did I consider them to be overly disconcerting. More than
anything, the Project wiki was presented as the basis for my
understanding of the codebase (but in time the page should be amended).
Regarding Cairo components and the Mozilla Public License:
The license has zero role in the package - but rules state that licenses
need to be disclosed in debian/copyright for ALL source in a given
source tarball, whether that code is used in final binary packages or
not. The embedded copies of cairo and pixman are NOT used in the binary
packages. Nor is any Ms-PL source.
Apparently I have been misinformed on the components constituting the
Debian binary package and much of my concern over that misapprehended.
If one may ask, why is there code in the source tarball that does not
get included in the binary? Is their exclusion handled by configure
switches? The Project wiki provided an admirable description of the
role FFMPEG played in the package; perhaps a similar description could
be provided for code licensed under the MPL, LGPLv2.1, and Ms-PL.
Upstream recommends that their own copy of Cairo be used - I ignore
this, basically because I hate duplication of libraries (as do
ftp-master), and there doesn't seem to be any actual changes to the
bundled copy that would necessitate giving it its own unique copy. It's
controlled by the --with-cairo flag - the package uses
--with-cairo=system to use Debian's Cairo.
The Ms-PL stuff consists of two places - some Javascript files (which
are never compiled anyway, and are used as part of the test harness),
and Microsoft's Silverlight Controls (which would be enabled using
--with-managed=yes, default is no). This stuff isn't compiled basically
because Moonlight 1.0 isn't usable as a Managed (Silverlight
2.0-compatible) plugin. When it eventually IS compiled in future
packages, then it'll be as distinct libraries - i.e. the moon source
package isn't producing one enormous .so mixing all its constituent
libraries, the Ms-PL section of the source will be compiled into its
own .dll with no mingling of other incompatibly-licensed source. And I
think we can agree that using a library with one license on a runtime
with another license is fine (Just ask the libc folks)
As a final comment, and one more hypothetical in nature, the Ms-PL
makes no distinction between derived and collective works and offers no
exemption for mere aggregation (as does the General Public License).
In lieu of such an exception, we are left with relying upon the
interpretation of the courts as to what constitutes a derived or
collected work of joint authorship under copyright law. Should a
Ms-PL-licensed package be included with a Debian distribution, it may
very well be argued that the entire distribution (a collective work)
must be offered under licensing which complies with the Ms-PL -- any
inclusion of code for which there is no patent grant could be construed
as infringement of the copyrights of Ms-PLed code's author.
How likely does that REALLY seem to you? codeplex.com contains a lot of
Ms-PL source, and a lot of other licenses (including some non-Free
licenses). How likely does it seem that a mere aggregation like a code
website is actually licensing everything under one of its constituent
licenses, by accident?
Let me clarify that when I stated my comment was more hypothetical,
it was precisely owing to the fact that the Moonlight packages are in
a third-party repository and that a code website should probably not
be considered under copyright law definitions as a ?joint work? (...
a work prepared by two or more authors with the intention that their
contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a
unitary whole - USC Title 17 ยง 101). The argument that a Debian
distribution might be a joint work, however, is not quite so
