On Mon, 1 Sep 2014, Mike Gabriel wrote:
I have just scanned latest packaged-in-Debian freerdp code [1]. I cannot see
any hint about FreeRDP upstream having licensed anything as GPL.
Upstream claims that FreeRDP is no longer based on any GPL code. We are
not convinced that this is the case. After all, the FreeRDP project was
founded based on rdesktop ~1.6; a GPL project.
You have to consider distribution maintainers (like us Debian maintainers) as
some sort of librarians. We take software (books) and place them into the
correct shelves and make all the books of the library live well together with
each other. Nothing more we do.
...
Unless upstream cannot be convinced, there is not much I (or Debian in
general, I guess) can do for you. Esp. I as the Debian maintainer of FreeRDP
cannot relicense the upstream code under another license. That is beyond my
scope as a package maintainer (have you ever seen librarians rewriting pages
of some of the books they offer in their library???).
From a legal perspective, distributing software is much more than "place
books into the correct shelves". Any Linux distribution distributing
software incorrectly, including Debian, could face legal actions.
You can certainly distribute Apache software under GPL instead. And yes,
in contrast to normal books, it's common that Linux distributions changes
the distributed software, more or less.
Regards,
---
Peter Astrand ThinLinc Chief Developer
Cendio AB http://cendio.com
Teknikringen 8 http://twitter.com/ThinLinc
583 30 Linkoping http://facebook.com/ThinLinc
Phone: +46-13-214600 http://google.com/+CendioThinLinc
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