"Paul R. Tagliamonte" <paul...@gmail.com> writes: > The real question is it less *distributable*? If its GPL and contains > things *not* in preferred form, I'd say yes, that would be less > distributable, since its a GPL violation and results in breech of > license - which means we can't distribute.
I think this is where one also applies the point that the law was intended to be understood by humans, not lawyers. I don't find it particularly likely that redistributing the exact same files that upstream releases under the GPL is going to be found to be a copyright violation by any actual court. There are scenarios where this could still be a problem, of course. Most of them involve a transfer of ownership from one copyright holder to another, who then starts using license terms to try to pull back all the code. That's (one of) the reasons why we're rightfully nervous about such things in the main archive. (Another is that, regardless of what the license says, it's bad for a free software distribution to distribute software that cannot be easily modified, which is one of the major reasons why we insist on having the preferred form for modifications.) However, we've always previously treated Alioth and similar places on a looser basis, with the understanding that we'll follow reasonable precuations to comply with upstream's license and take things down if someone complains about it. I am certain there is technically undistributable stuff in Git repositories on git.debian.org. If someone notices, we should obviously remove it, but I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over it, or worry about cases like this one where the potential license conflict is questionable and not upstream's intent. In other words, I think people are jumping on Charles because he took a confrontational position, but when one looks at the details of what he's talking about doing, it's not atypical for Alioth use in general. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87hadd62tt....@windlord.stanford.edu
