This is an interesting problem, there are great open source Java projects out there that, but no fault of their own, are using libraries from a repo that Debian can't access (no copyright notice and no license makes it a non-starter). Add the library versioning/API breakage potential on top of that, and it's even harder. If only maven's repos had their source code and license available, I can imagine some script to scrape their repo and make policy compliant .debs from them...
I think Stefane picked a great example of how Debian packages are made policy compliant (and the work needed for every java library) On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 6:25 AM, Stefane Fermigier <[email protected]> wrote: > What I was trying to say is that projects created by or through foundations > or responsible companies tend to obey a certain legal and quality process, > not that there are more important that other projects. I have no doubt that those foundations follow their legal responsibilities, It's just that when Debian hosts the code, it's now Debian's legal responsibility to follow whatever license whomever holds the copyright has assigned to us. > > BTW, here's what geogebra's download page > (http://www.geogebra.org/cms/en/download) says: "You are free to copy, > distribute and transmit GeoGebra for non-commercial purposes". > > Isn't this a flagrant violation of the DFSG (Item 6, "No Discrimination > Against Fields of Endeavor") ? That is a perfect example of how Debian does a "value add" to their packages. The full license is at: http://www.geogebra.org/download/license.txt and the debian copyright is: http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/g/geogebra/geogebra_3.2.46.0+dfsg1-1/geogebra.copyright Only the installer is CC-BY-SA-NC (which is not DFSG free), so the debian maintainer removed the -NC code so the remaining files are all GPL-2+ and CC-BY-SA. You can see the +dfsg in the package version, indicating that someone did work to make it dfsg. That's why we'd need the source code and license for each jar, but situations like that are very common. Cheers, Scott -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
