On Tue, Oct 07, 2008, Russ Allbery wrote: > I would be very uncomfortable trying to fill out something that specific. > It looks remarkably like legal advice that I'm not qualified to give or > judge.
I agree it looks like legal advice, and neither would I be capable of handing out legal advice. But we need to reconcile the patent or legal constraints which we set on the Debian packages with clearly outlined policies or provide people with the mean to implement their own. IOW, either a) we write down what we allow and disallow in packages (the checks after the DFSG checks) and apply them to the whole of Debian, the rest isn't Debian, or b) we document worthwhile information, try to distribute anything DFSG free which we can, and let downstream recipients check what they need to check. The current way we handle the DFSG licensing part is with debian/copyright summing it up, and running that through ftpmaster checks. If we have similar constraints for legal or patent stuff, why not do the same thing? I'm more for b) because I'd like to kill some out of archive packages and because Debian == Universal OS. I don't see how we can be universal if we take the lowest common denominator of what's permitted in all countries in the world and according to all patents claim. Perhaps this involves getting legal advice, or having a legal team. Trying to divide into components wont work IMO; we wont ever have enough classifications in this way. -- Loïc Minier -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
