Re: Bug#68256: License problems with TinyMUSH
On Sun, Aug 17, 2003 at 06:31:00PM -0400, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: On Sun, 2003-08-17 at 15:21, Joel Baker wrote: The TinyMUSH package is not DFSG-free, Agreed. There are some additional problems: * TinyMUSH 3.0 Copyright * * Users of this software incur the obligation to make their best efforts to * inform the authors of noteworthy uses of this software. Fails the desert island test (though the desert island test originally was modifications, so this may be even worse). That being the most glaring problem, and the reason it caught my eye (on scanning some archived ITP stuff for other reasons). * * All materials developed as a consequence of the use of this software * shall duly acknowledge such use, in accordance with the usual standards * of acknowledging credit in academic research. Unclear, but I don't see a problem here as long as its interpreted reasonably. It is possible that if interpreted less nicely, this would contaminate other works (for example, are data files used with the package covered?) Context: the derivatives of TinyMUD are all game servers which provide a virtual world for people to interact in. The context in which this was almost certainly meant would, in fact, cover data files - the world which was developed using the server as an organizational tool. I don't claim to speak for the author's intent, but I would *not* assume that their intent would not contaminate data files; historically, this clause has been assumed to by many people involved in the development/user community. * * TinyMUSH 3.0 may be used for commercial, for-profit applications, subject * to the following conditions: You must acknowledge the origin of the * software, retaining this copyright notice in some prominent place. * You may charge only for access to the service you provide, not for * the TinyMUSH 3.0 software itself. You must inform the authors of any * commercial use of this software. Informing thing again. Yup. To the best of my knowlege, there is nothing in any of the licenses involved in any version of TinyMUSH which would prevent distribution, even in patched binary form, so it should be fine for non-free No. Nothing in that license gives us permission to modify, copy, or distribute that software. By default, we don't have those permissions. Hmmm. I would bet that they did an exceedingly poor job of wording an intent that includes other license texts which occur previously in the full file (which are more benign; more or less being a 3-clause BSD license, under which the modifications from 1.x to 2.0/2.2 were released). The origional 1.x licensing is also... messy, so I wouldn't assume even a 2.0 or 2.2 release would be DFSG-free, short of someone doing a lot of legwork to demonstrate otherwise (author contacts, etc). -- Joel Baker [EMAIL PROTECTED],''`. Debian GNU NetBSD/i386 porter: :' : `. `' `- pgpfy28e6kyOc.pgp Description: PGP signature
ircd-hybrid and OpenSSL
Hello debian-legal, It was recently brought to my attention that my package, ircd-hybrid, currently in the archive under main/net, needs to be corrected one way or another due to its use of OpenSSL for encrypted server-to-server connections. The source itself is licensed under pure GPLv2. Marco D'Itri told me that I should be able to do one of the following: 1) Talk with upstream (which I am a part of) and get the consensus to amend the license of present and future releases like so: This program is licensed under the GNU General Public License, with the exception that linking against the OpenSSL libraries is allowed. 2) Rewrite the crypto backend to use GNU TLS. I would much prefer to do the former, to say the least. Can you please advise on the wording of the amendment if it is a suitable alternative to rewriting a large amount of code? Please CC me; I'm not subscribed. Thanks, Josh pgpBdRrAmfBmU.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: ircd-hybrid and OpenSSL
On Sun, Aug 17, 2003 at 10:55:45PM -0700, Joshua Kwan wrote: It was recently brought to my attention that my package, ircd-hybrid, currently in the archive under main/net, needs to be corrected one way or another due to its use of OpenSSL for encrypted server-to-server connections. The source itself is licensed under pure GPLv2. Marco D'Itri told me that I should be able to do one of the following: 1) Talk with upstream (which I am a part of) and get the consensus to amend the license of present and future releases like so: This program is licensed under the GNU General Public License, with the exception that linking against the OpenSSL libraries is allowed. Hybrid has been cobbled together from significant contributions by countless dozens of people, stretching all the way back to Jarkko Oikarinen. The University of Oulu probably also has partial copyright interest. You would need postive approval (not just consensus) from _all_ of these people - which first means you've got to find them all. Basically: forget it. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | pgpi3moNmC5Ux.pgp Description: PGP signature
license for newbiedoc
[for debian-legal people: please Cc: to me, I'm not subscribed to the list] Currently some of newbiedoc documentation (including mine) are licensed under GFDL. To make sure newbiedoc can stay in main, I'm planning to change the license. What license is recommended? The document is written in the SGML format, so I don't think GPL is the best in this case. For example, if you want to mirror the HTML version of the ducument, GPL forces you to mirror the SGML source as well or at least add a link to the source manually. For your information, newbiedoc is not dead. Finally a sendmail documentation was posted to the mailing list for review last month. (I can't review it because I don't use sendmail.) -- Oohara Yuuma [EMAIL PROTECTED] Debian developer PGP key (key ID F464A695) http://www.interq.or.jp/libra/oohara/pub-key.txt Key fingerprint = 6142 8D07 9C5B 159B C170 1F4A 40D6 F42E F464 A695 enlightened self-interest --- Nathanael Nerode, on discussion about the reason to contribute to Debian
Re: FFII-online-protest against patents
Felix E. Klee wrote: I guess that most of you are informed about software patents and know that they are incompatible with most, if not all, free software licenses (if not visit http://tinyurl.com/k64f). No need to encrypt and hide URLs or did I miss something important? While planning this event we came up with the idea of a parallel online protest in the form of a simulation of the effects of software patents on free software: We want operators of servers running/serving free software to shut down their site (or only offer access to it through some kind of backdoor) and display a statement concerning software patents instead. You can see an example on the FFII web site at http://www.ffii.org. We would like to see this statement to appear on as many web servers as possible (or all over the web) on 27th August, the day of the event. BTW, in *my personal opinion* the whole thing would have much more of an impact if sites were shut down for a day and no backdoor is offered. Are there any chances that the Debian project participates in this online protest? About zero. How can I reach people responsible for the web site? That's written on about *every* web page. Check the *last* link on any of them. Regards, Joey -- The only stupid question is the unasked one.
Re: FFII-online-protest against patents
On Mon, 18 Aug 2003 17:40:10 +0200 Martin Schulze wrote: Felix E. Klee wrote: I guess that most of you are informed about software patents and know that they are incompatible with most, if not all, free software licenses(if not visit http://tinyurl.com/k64f). No need to encrypt and hide URLs or did I miss something important? I often use tinyurl.com to make URLs shorter when writing emails. Felix -- To contact me in private don't reply but send mail to felix DOT klee AT inka DOT de
Re: A possible approach in solving the FDL problem
Anthony DeRobertis wrote: On Sat, 2003-08-16 at 09:58, Sergey V. Spiridonov wrote: DFSG use word software which have several meanings. Because DFSG does not specify which particular meaning it use, there is a way to speculate. Actually it *does* define what it means. See Social Contract, Clause 1. It defines it as... 1. Define software as everything which Debian distributes. That's it. Sorry, probably native English speaker will correct me, I think it is not. Especialy with the phrase users who develop and run non-free software. This relates clearly to programs. -- Best regards, Sergey Spiridonov
Re: Inconsistencies in our approach
On Mon, 18 Aug 2003 17:06:49 +0300, Richard Braakman [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: On Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 04:33:05PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote: I will grant that these definitions are imperfect and improbable arguments could be lodged against them; at the same time, I believe that reasonable people not engaging in a Jesuit exercise to find logical needles in a haystack of common sense are able to tell the difference between a manpage and a C source file. Could you be bothered to demonstrate such discernment? The page http://www.stdc.com/QMS/documentation/ belongs to an old project of mine; could you tell the documentation apart from the code? I can also send, on request, the full set of man pages generated (I think there are 350+ man pages, so attaching them to this mail is going to be a problem for many people). (For the record, the source code -- the .h and .cpp files -- are the sole sources of the HTML pages you see at that URL). I would also suggest that you look at doxygen before making assertions like this. Or are you suggesting that we sweep literate programming under the rug while considering how we treat licensing of content that we are planning on shipping on the official CD? The only way I can see to distinguish them is to say that the comments in a .cpp file are not code, and documentation, and may be considered separately from the code itself [humourcopyright blah vlah -- you may distribute this program such that the code is under the gpl, but the comments may not be modified oniota, they are under the gfdl invariant clause/humour] manoj -- None of our men are experts. We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert -- because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the expert state of mind a great number of things become impossible. From Henry Ford Sr., My Life and Work Manoj Srivastava [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/ 1024R/C7261095 print CB D9 F4 12 68 07 E4 05 CC 2D 27 12 1D F5 E8 6E 1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
Re: Inconsistencies in our approach
Richard Braakman wrote: I would recommend this book if the compiler were free :-) I'm not claiming that the *book* is software; it's quite hard, as I found out when I dropped it on my foot. But its source code certainly is. I agree, source code is still program, even if it is printed in the book. Documentation is still documentation even if it is loaded in computer memory and processed by TeX. The main difference is, that instructions and commands in program are not only for human, they are also for PC. Instructions and commands in documenation are for human. They can be mixed, of course, as book can contain text and images. TeX document have special instructions for computer, how it should process the text. Programs have comments which are for human. -- Best regards, Sergey Spiridonov
Re: A possible approach in 'solving' the FDL problem
On Fri, Aug 08, 2003 at 10:38:34AM -0400, Brian T. Sniffen wrote: But now you're telling me it distributes Software, Documentation... anything else in there? Configuration files, templates, icons, menu entries, sound effects, change logs, message catalogs... Sheesh, that's complicated. I used to think that my packages contained just software :) I'll do the Debian Free Menu Entry Guidelines, and I can help with the Debian Free Sound Effect Guidelines. Does anyone want to take some of the others? We have a lot of work ahead. Richard Braakman
Re: A possible approach in 'solving' the FDL problem
On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 04:43:41PM -0400, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: Please understand that the readers of -legal have been subject to no less than half a year (or are we at a year now...?) of GFDL discussions, Almost two years now. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200110/msg00126.html Richard Braakman
Re: A possible approach in solving the FDL problem
Jimmy Kaplowitz [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Sat, Aug 16, 2003 at 01:02:44AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: On Fri, Aug 15, 2003 at 01:30:48PM -0400, Jimmy Kaplowitz wrote: It can buy freedom, depending on what exactly you buy, as Wouter said. If you have bought it, what you have isn't freedom. I was talking about buying rights to a non-free software package and making it free for you and everyone else ... you have paid money to make there be a free software package where before there was only a non-free one ... that is buying freedom (for yourself, which you then share with others via a DFSG-free license), in a very real sense that pertains very much to copyright law. Blender is more free now than it was before the community paid $100K. But Blender has no freedom -- it's just a bunch of bits. And the community is no more free for having bought Blender than it was before -- certainly, I am no more free now than I was before other people paid money for Blender. -Brian
Re: Bug#68256: License problems with TinyMUSH
On Sun, 2003-08-17 at 18:31, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: On Sun, 2003-08-17 at 15:21, Joel Baker wrote: * TinyMUSH 3.0 Copyright * * Users of this software incur the obligation to make their best efforts to * inform the authors of noteworthy uses of this software. Fails the desert island test (though the desert island test originally was modifications, so this may be even worse). Err, if your best effort is um, no phone, no internet access, no ability to inform anybody I don't see how this fails the desert island test. It doesn't say you have to inform: it says you have to make your best effort.
Re: Bug#68256: License problems with TinyMUSH
Joe Drew [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Sun, 2003-08-17 at 18:31, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: On Sun, 2003-08-17 at 15:21, Joel Baker wrote: * TinyMUSH 3.0 Copyright * * Users of this software incur the obligation to make their best efforts to * inform the authors of noteworthy uses of this software. Fails the desert island test (though the desert island test originally was modifications, so this may be even worse). Err, if your best effort is um, no phone, no internet access, no ability to inform anybody I don't see how this fails the desert island test. It doesn't say you have to inform: it says you have to make your best effort. This is part of the reason for the dissident variation on the desert island test: your best effort may get you in trouble with the authorities. Of course, the original intent may have been that this be a request and not binding. -- Jeremy Hankins [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
Re: FFII-online-protest against patents
On Sat, 16 Aug 2003 21:13:38 +0200 Felix E. Klee wrote: You can see an example on the FFII web site at http://www.ffii.org. There is a special page set up now with more examples: http://swpat.ffii.org/group/demo Felix -- To contact me in private don't reply but send mail to felix DOT klee AT inka DOT de
Re: A possible approach in solving the FDL problem
Sergey V. Spiridonov wrote: In this case I buy nothing but freedom for this program. I can also say: freedom for people to use this program on less restrictive license. -- Best regards, Sergey Spiridonov
Re: A possible approach in 'solving' the FDL problem
Richard Braakman wrote: On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 04:43:41PM -0400, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: Please understand that the readers of -legal have been subject to no less than half a year (or are we at a year now...?) of GFDL discussions, Almost two years now. http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/debian-legal-200110/msg00126.html If it was decided, why DFSG and SC were not changed? At least there should be a statement included in DFSG, saying Please, read debian-legal archive since 2001, before you think you understand what DFSG is about. DON'T RELY ON DICTIONARIES!. -- Best regards, Sergey Spiridonov
Re: A possible approach in 'solving' the FDL problem
On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 09:11:18PM +0300, Richard Braakman wrote: On Fri, Aug 08, 2003 at 10:38:34AM -0400, Brian T. Sniffen wrote: But now you're telling me it distributes Software, Documentation... anything else in there? Configuration files, templates, icons, menu entries, sound effects, change logs, message catalogs... Sheesh, that's complicated. I used to think that my packages contained just software :) I'll do the Debian Free Menu Entry Guidelines, and I can help with the Debian Free Sound Effect Guidelines. Does anyone want to take some of the others? We have a lot of work ahead. What about the copy of the DFSG contained within doc-debian? Do we need a DFSGFSG as well? I can predict an infinite series here... -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | pgp4iDY0lyr5x.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: A possible approach in 'solving' the FDL problem
Sergey V. Spiridonov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Please, read debian-legal archive since 2001, before you think you understand what DFSG is about. DON'T RELY ON DICTIONARIES!. Alternatively, ask someone who knows or rely on good dictionaries. Now, can this thread please die until there is new data?
Re: license for newbiedoc
On Monday, Aug 18, 2003, at 06:39 US/Eastern, Oohara Yuuma wrote: The document is written in the SGML format, so I don't think GPL is the best in this case. For example, if you want to mirror the HTML version of the ducument, GPL forces you to mirror the SGML source as well or at least add a link to the source manually. So did the GFDL. If you don't like this requirement, you may want to go with something like the MIT X11 or new BSD license. Beware that someone could then create a proprietary version of the document. [ OP, Oohara Yuuma, asks to be cc'd on replies. ]
