Because I've been unable to get feedback from Thorsten Alteholz or any of the other FTP masters about this issue, I'm now directing this to debian-legal in the hope we can get a dialog going between the Debian project and the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium). I'm getting the impression that the FTP masters are unwilling to discuss this issue because it might constitute legal advise which is problematic in the US, or because they only enforce the DFSG and not set the terms of its interpretation.
A recurring problem with geospatial software in the Free Software community and Debian in particular has been the terms of the OGC Document Notice and Software Notice licenses. The problematic OGC license terms were first discussed with you after the rejection of TinyOWS [0]. The discussion triggered by the rejection raised some issues [1] that to this day cannot be resolved because we've not been able to establish a dialogue between the Debian FTP masters and OGC. In February 2015 the problematic OGC licenses were discussed on the OSGeo standards list [2], because the PyCSW project and its packaging was affected by the same issues as TinyOWS [3]. OGC followed that discussion and wants "to do whatever possible to ensure that OGC licensing is not a hurdle". OGC has provided George Percivall (CC'ed) as a contact point to discuss the OGC license terms, and I hope we can determine the appropriate person or team in Debian to fulfil this role on the Debian side. The FTP masters seemed the best choice initially, but their lack of feedback on this issue make doubt they want to help resolve this issue. If debian-legal is also not the appropriate contact in Debian, can you suggest who would be a good contact in Debian to discuss the licensing issues with people from OGC? Scott Simmons (also CC'ed) informed me [4] that they never heard back from Debian when they tried to discuss this issue. Since I directed them to the general ftpmaster@ contact and that didn't work out, I addressed Thorsten Alteholz personally [5] since has was the FTP master to reject these packages and involved in the follow-up discussion. That also didn't work out, so now I'm trying my luck with debian-legal. [0] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-January/017300.html [1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-January/017321.html [2] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/standards/2015-February/000834.html [3] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-November/024520.html [4] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/standards/2015-November/000937.html [5] https://lists.debian.org/debian-gis/2015/11/msg00038.html Kind Regards, Bas -- GPG Key ID: 4096R/6750F10AE88D4AF1 Fingerprint: 8182 DE41 7056 408D 6146 50D1 6750 F10A E88D 4AF1