Jeff, Above and beyond the issue of distributing code without proper license notices, the APSL 2.0 is not, in the opinion of many (and AFAICT, according to the consensus of the debian-legal mailing list), a free license under the DFSG. Although there's been extensive discussion about *which* points of the license are actually DFSG problems, the questionable clauses are multiple:
- The copyright license is terminated if you attempt to defend your patent rights against Apple. - The license requires you to publish any local modifications if you deploy public services based on the Covered Code, which discriminates against a field of endeavour. - The license includes a choice of venue clause forcing all licensees to accept the jurisdiction of the Northern District of California, which is discriminatory against persons located outside this district by exposing them to unequal legal expense. Again, while the question of which parts of the license (if any) fail the DFSG is still somewhat open, the fact is that this license imposes a number of restrictions on the licensee which are not present in more traditional Free Software licenses. Now that it's known that this package is licensed under the APSL and not under a BSD license, I believe it's best to remove mdnsresponder from the archive until such a time as it's made available under a different license or there's a clear consensus that the APSL 2.0 is a DFSG-free license. If you agree with this assessment but don't have time to clean the source tree, let me know and I can take a look at doing this for you. Thanks, -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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