On Thu, Nov 08, 2012 at 04:25:51PM +0100, Leo 'costela' Antunes wrote: > Hi, > > Ansgar has recently made an MBF against all packages including the > problematic JSON license term "The Software shall be used for Good, not > Evil". From what I've seen, most - if not all - of the affected packages > are using in-source libraries copyright JSON.org, which AFAIK means > convincing a single author to relicense would be enough (though IANAL, > of course).
Assuming (of course), that this is upstream's decision. This stems from a well respected JS hacker, Douglas Crockford. He is pretty serious about this clause, and mocks anyone who wished to have it removed. As a result, any code forked from his is subject to these (insane) terms. It's kept a linter out of Debian that I care about, and I'm not happy with this fellow. He gave an IBM to "allow them or any of their clients to do evil with the software" (Not a direct quote, can't be bothered to google for it), which is a laugh. I think there's a jshint-next or something that can replace a lot of Crockford's nonfree code that is written from scratch under Expat. Unsure on their release timeline. > > Thomas Koch tried solving this issue more than two years ago[0] and > upstream was apparently unwilling. Should we maybe try again? As Ansgar > mentioned in one bugreport, the license is considered non-free not only > by us, but by Fedora as well[1] (and it's also notOSI-recognized), so > I'm hoping we might have some leverageif we try again with enough > finesse and persuasion. > > This affects a lot of packages and at least in my case (transmission) > itseems impracticable to replace the library for wheezy and it's > unfortunately too deeply wound with transmission itself to be simply > removed. So I'll probably be forced to move the package to non-free, > which would really be a shame (specially considering its big popcon). > > Anyone interested in giving this another try? DPL, you're pretty > eloquent and your voice may carry some extra weight? ;) > > > Cheers > > [0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2010/03/msg00064.html > [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main#Bad_Licenses > Cheers, Paul -- .''`. Paul Tagliamonte <paul...@debian.org> : :' : Proud Debian Developer `. `'` 4096R / 8F04 9AD8 2C92 066C 7352 D28A 7B58 5B30 807C 2A87 `- http://people.debian.org/~paultag
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