Re: Open Publication License v1.0 is not DFSG-free. WWW pages need relicensing?
* Simon Law [EMAIL PROTECTED] [2004-03-03 00:09:34 -0500]: On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 03:08:29PM -0500, Jeremy Hankins wrote: --- Debian-legal summary --- The OPL (Open Publication License) is not DFSG free: Oh yeah. We now have a small problem: http://www.debian.org/license Our webpages are have been judged as non-free by Debian Legal. I am willing to write up a summary to present to the appropriate people: [EMAIL PROTECTED] I presume. Should this be done? What should we recommend they do? Simon How ironic. Alex.
Re: Debian Legal summary of the X-Oz License
On 2004-03-03 05:18:57 + Ben Reser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is there a licence in Debian that is conditional on X-Oz's clause 4 wording. I'm not sure I follow you as in what you mean by conditional. One such that the permissions granted by the licence are conditional on satisfying X-Oz's clause 4 wording. That's not the case for the XFree86 1.0 licence, so maybe we can ignore wrong dumb statements in that (IANAL not looking at the 1.0 licence).
Re: Open Publication License v1.0 is not DFSG-free. WWW pages need relicensing?
On 2004-03-03 05:09:34 + Simon Law [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Oh yeah. We now have a small problem: http://www.debian.org/license I think this is a known bug mentioned in bugs.debian.org/192748 and I suggest expanding that bug report with a new title. As we don't package the web pages (?) it's still only wishlist. Trying to attract attention on -www is probably a good idea too. It seems that at least one person would like GPL. -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know. Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
GIF patent [Debian Weekly News - March 2nd, 2004]
On Tue, 2004-03-02 at 21:04, Martin Schulze wrote: Bradley Kuhn reminded us of the [4]GIF patent that IBM holds until 2006, even though the Unisys patent will expire soon. 4. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html Right. And this is how I responded: In the thread at debian-legal, we also concluded that it doesn't make sense to respect every stupid patent because then we could just discontinue to work on Debian and GNU. Anthony DeRobertis noted that we just care about companies known to haunt patent infringements by Free Software. Even if IBM would start to do that, we would be in a good position because because of the Unisys patent, the invention of IBM is legally to consider as prior art and therefore void. Bradley considered this a reasonable position. If we don't have decided otherwise on debian-legal until 7 July, I will probably start to move the packages in question to main together with Andreas Barth. But if we decide to be more pedantic about this one (extend the waiting period) I will set hyperlatex free for adoption (or orphan it). Note that in this case we should seriously think about removing GTK+, Qt etc. from main because of the reasons discussed earlier on debian-legal [1]. bye, Roland [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/debian-legal-200402/msg00168.html signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
GPL , what does it mean? -- the name that is.
Hello, I imagine that many of us are familiar with the documented origin of the GNU General Public License (GPL) http://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/ but where does the name come from? Was general a common term in licenses then? It does seem that general (, generally) are regularly used by Mr. Stallman, What about public? Were public licenses common? Any insights are appreciated, Thank you, Lloyd PS I discussed this with my local LUG, but no one knew the answer. Not discouraged, I thought if there is any mailing list that might know, it is debial-legal.
Re: X-Oz Technologies
Branden Robinson wrote: I was unaware that the X-Oz Technolgies license already existed (under a different name, maybe?). Can you please direct me to the software projects that used it before X-Oz did? I don't mean the individual parts of the license; I know examples where those have been used. I mean the entire license as used by X-Oz (with other copyright holders' names substituted, of course). I don't recall that exact license ever having come up on this list before, and I've been subscribed for a few years -- but my memory is sadly imperfect. References to where the Free Software Foundation, Open Source Initiative, and other organizations certified it as satisfying their standards would be helpful as well. I am assuming that the X-Oz Technologies license is not *intended* to be precisely identical in meaning to the XFree86 1.0 license or Apache 1.1 license, else I expect X-Oz would have simply used one or the other of those licenses. I had thought that X-Oz independently developed its license because neither the XFree86 1.0 nor Apache 1.1 licenses achieved the desired result. Sue, There is a principle in hermeneutics that says: there are no useless words. This means, basically: if you want to say the same thing, use the same words. If you don't use the same words, you don't want to say the same thing. Basically, if X-Oz wants the same disposition as Apache Foundation (license v.1.1) /or/ XFree (license v.1.0), it should use the same license; or else, the only real -- and /legal/ -- conclusion is that the disposition is not the same. and I think that makes sense since one cannot interpret the license everytime for every reader. I don't think that will be necessary; with luck, X-Oz's answers to the questions Debian has raised can be dissemenated widely, as this discussion is taking place in a public forum. X-Oz certainly has my permission to quote my correspondence with you on this subject if would be helpful towards drafting a FAQ about your license, if you'd like to do that. You know, this (clarification of the terms of the license) may not be binding, but is a start. []s, Massa
Re: Debian Legal summary of the X-Oz License
Ben Reser [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Because the language is so unclear, I'm going with the most logical interpretation I can come up with. I think that this captures why I, at least, am a bit uncomfortable with your analysis. I haven't looked in any detail at the license, so I've mostly stayed out of this discussion. But I do think that as a matter of method, the above is the wrong approach. If language is unclear we have two options: - Look only at the most restrictive interpretation - or, if that's not free, seek clarification. Judging by past experience, we can't always expect license authors to take what is to us the most reasonable interpretation. If in fact they do, there should be no problem at all getting clarification. But pending clarification, we must assume the worst. The principle at work here is that we have an obligation to our users, not to the copyright holders. I realize that copyright holders are going to be frustrated with this approach because it may be hard for them to judge where d-l stands on a license at times. For this reason it's worthwhile to work on improving communication with upstream licensors. But that must take second place to our obligation to make sure that our users aren't surprised by un-free clauses in licenses. -- Jeremy Hankins [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
Re: Debian Legal summary of the X-Oz License
Branden Robinson wrote: As I said in my mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]: 4. Except as contained in this notice, the name of X-Oz Technologies shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization from X-Oz Technologies. The cynic in me really wants to ask: Is this message in violation of the copyright license? I mean, Branden is clearly having some dealing with [this] Software, and he has invoked the name of x-oz (in the email address). Branden, did you have prior written authorization? --Joe
Re: Summary: Is Open Publication License v1.0 compatible?, was Re: GPL+ for docs
Simon Law [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 03:08:29PM -0500, Jeremy Hankins wrote: Here's a summary, since it doesn't seem like anyone has anything more to say on the subject: Hmm... I hate to seem authoritarian, but I'd like to see a little more formality in d-l summaries. I think we should take it on a case-by-case basis. For many cases, I'm afraid, this would simply end up taking up most of our time following the forms of producing summaries. My judgement was that there is no real controversy on this issue, so I went ahead and posted a simple summary. What would be nice is a draft to go out a couple of days before the actual summary is published. This allows people who are busy to get their last words in. For cases where there's controversy, I certainly agree. But if we want to start doing this for every issue that comes to debian-legal we need to make it very simple to do or we'll quickly get bogged down. IMHO, this would mean we need a problem tracking infrastructure to handle it. (I know of no reason the BTS couldn't be used for this -- for example, with a dummy package ala WNPP. But not knowing the BTS all that well I hesitate to say so for sure.) As well, it would be nice to quote the entire license and our exact concerns in the summary. This way, people looking through our archives in the future won't have to do more research tracking down lost texts. That's a sensible idea. Not only does it make browsing the archive simpler, but it also specifies clearly which license we're talking about, when there are several versions. I'll do that in the future, but unless folks really think it necessary, I won't bother for this case. -- Jeremy Hankins [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
Re: GPL , what does it mean? -- the name that is.
Lloyd Budd said on Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 05:28:08AM -0500,: but where does the name come from? Was general a common term in licenses then? It does seem that general (, generally) are regularly used by Mr. Stallman, What about public? Were public licenses common? A license, issued to all members of the /public/ in /general/. HTH, and correct me if I am wrong. -- +~+ Mahesh T. Pai, LL.M., 'NANDINI', S. R. M. Road, Ernakulam, Cochin-682018, Kerala, India. http://paivakil.port5.com +~+
Re: Debian Legal summary of the X-Oz License
On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 05:34:41AM -0700, Joe Moore wrote: Branden Robinson wrote: As I said in my mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]: 4. Except as contained in this notice, the name of X-Oz Technologies shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization from X-Oz Technologies. The cynic in me really wants to ask: Is this message in violation of the copyright license? I mean, Branden is clearly having some dealing with [this] Software, and he has invoked the name of x-oz (in the email address). Branden, did you have prior written authorization? It doesn't matter. Branden isn't copying, modifying, distributing or publically performing any Work covered under this license. Simon
Re: Summary: Is Open Publication License v1.0 compatible?, was Re: GPL+ for docs
On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 10:00:44AM -0500, Jeremy Hankins wrote: Simon Law [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 03:08:29PM -0500, Jeremy Hankins wrote: Here's a summary, since it doesn't seem like anyone has anything more to say on the subject: Hmm... I hate to seem authoritarian, but I'd like to see a little more formality in d-l summaries. I think we should take it on a case-by-case basis. For many cases, I'm afraid, this would simply end up taking up most of our time following the forms of producing summaries. My judgement was that there is no real controversy on this issue, so I went ahead and posted a simple summary. Hmmm I think I'll set up a webpage containing our license summaries over the weekend. Simon
Re: GPL , what does it mean? -- the name that is.
On Mar 3, 2004, at 05:28, Lloyd Budd wrote: Was general a common term in licenses then? It does seem that general (, generally) are regularly used by Mr. Stallman, may I suggest asking [EMAIL PROTECTED] ?
Experience with convincing people to DFSGize their licenses?
Hi, I am (among other packages...) maintaining Festival, the speech synthesizer. There are several languages for which Festival voices exist which are publically available, but under a somewhat restrictive copyright (non-commercial, non-military, non-transferable, ...). Specifically, I know of a German voice; a user pointed me towards an Italian voice. Obviously I don't think that this is an ideal situation. Thus I am going to make some effort to convince the copyright holders to lift these restrictions, and either re- or dual-license their data. To facilitate this, I wonder whether there are any boilerplate letters I might copy (+ translate + extend + ...). The next question is, which DFSG-free license would you recommend for (mostly-)non-program files? -- Matthias Urlichs signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Experience with convincing people to DFSGize their licenses?
On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 11:24:32PM +0100, Matthias Urlichs wrote: The next question is, which DFSG-free license would you recommend for (mostly-)non-program files? The GPL is good enough for pretty much anything. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
