Charles Plessy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I think that it is a bit frivolous to distribute software with > advertisment clause in main and not properly warning the redistributors, > who are the most likely persons to infringe the clause. We should > remeber that for other aspects of licencing and intellectual property > management, Debian is much more rigorous, so the presence of 4-clauses > BSD licences is contradicting the principle of least surprise, that is > usually a good guidance.
I don't think it's horribly credible that including software covered by the 4-clause BSD license in Debian violates the principle of least surprise when we specifically list it as one of our acceptable licenses in the DFSG. But regardless, practically speaking, the inclusion of one more or fewer package in main with an advertising clause will make no practical difference for the requirements of any redistributor. Any serious attempt to eliminate this license from Debian would face other challenges first, such as removing OpenSSL from main. Unless someone has a plan to do that, which strikes me as unlikely, I disagree with an implication that including another package with this license would cause any additional problems for Debian redistributors. I have no problem with your other arguments against the 4-clause BSD license. I'm not arguing that it's a good license. But since you were giving advice to someone who is new to licensing issues, I wanted to clarify that including one more package with this license would not cause any noticable hardship for redistributors compared to what they already would need to deal with. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]