Scripsit Branden Robinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Not because the LGPL doesn't deserve a summary, but because it hasn't > been done right. The entire license needs to be posted and carefully > scrutinized.
Well, exactly in the LGPL case we don't need to scrutinize the entire license. We can do with noticing that any work covered by the LGPL is effectively dual-licensed with pure GPL, so the freedom of the former follows from freedom of the latter. A detailed analysis of the GPL might be an interesting exercise. But I'm afraid that it has several points where our best argument that it is free is that it is explicitly grandfathered by the DFSG. One could make a good case that our historical application of the DFSG can be approximated very closely by the rule of thumb that we accept any requirements found in the GPL (or one of the other grandfathered licenses) as free, and reject every clause that goes beyond what the DFSG requires of a distributor. Of course there are a small number of buts here - most prominently (a) the explicit patch rule in the DFSG, (b) that we traditionally accept advertising clauses, but grudgingly, and (c) that we don't require licenses to offer the "written promise valid for three years" option if they require co-distribution of source with binaries. > Furthermore, it might be wise if we only attempt to adjudicate licenses > that are brought to us for consideration. I'm not sure we should go on > hunts for licenses to audit ourselves; I agree that we should not try to audit licenses that do not apply to any actual or intended Debian packages. Not that it would matter much; if somebody really wanted to use http://www.debian.org/legal as a platform for a personal vendetta against a license - and he could get d-l to agree that the license is non-free - then it would be a simple matter for him to let a proxy (or pseudonym) file an ITP and formally request a summary of the license. -- Henning Makholm "Hi! I'm an Ellen Jamesian. Do you know what an Ellen Jamesian is?"
