Hi release team, hi James, I wanted to inform you about license problems with teTeX, and ask for your input. This bug might become a release blocker for etch, or not.
teTeX is a compilation of individual works with individual licenses, and at the moment the licenses of the individual parts are not listed in debian/copyright, or anywhere else. Here are the facts: Good news: We have finally set up an infrastructure that allows to keep track of license information of individual CTAN packages and even individual files, and create a proper debian/copyright file. Bad news: - Before this bug can be resolved, one needs to go through each individual package and check its license and the list of files covered. I have actually started doing that work, it is slowly but continuously progressing, but we have still *a*lot* of work to do. - In the small part I have already checked, I have found a considerable number of files with unclear licenses (in other words, probably intended to be free but not properly indicated) and some that are actually non-free. - I expect that in the remaining part, things will be similar. In other words, I expect non-free or unclearly licensed files in teTeX, which makes this bug release-critical. - Even if I continue to work as I do now, I don't know when this will be finished. And since my professional work situation might change in the second half of this year, I might even be forced to do less. There are some more points to consider additionally: - Debian probably can't release without TeX: even if it could be dropped as a dependency, replacing it as a build-dependency would be as hard work as resolving that bug. - TeXlive, which could serve as an alternative, suffers from the same problems (and profits from the same work and infrastructure) - teTeX in sarge has the very same problems. I don't expect any problems with the files added since then, because both CTAN package authors and teTeX upstream have been much more license-aware in the last years than in the old days. This means that "Debian stable" wouldn't get any better by not releasing etch because of this bug; but I don't know whether this warrants "etch-ignore" - I actually do not expect that we get any real legal problems. The files in question are and have been distributed so widely and for so long that *distributabilty* cannot realistically be denied by anyone. The problems are actually "only" questions of DFSG-freeness. I intend to ask for help on this bug as soon as the scripts used have been properly documented, be it release-critical for etch or not. But I wanted to make you aware of that problem early. Regards, Frank P.S. Many thanks, James, for filing that bug, really. I would never have imagined the mess teTeX actually is license-wise, and I'm learning a lot about internal workings of a TeX distribution that way. -- Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX)
