Glenn Maynard wrote: > On Wed, Sep 22, 2004 at 11:46:17AM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote: >>Your requirement that you be able to understand the license terms is >>perfectly reasonable. That does not mean Debian should have that >>requirement. Consider this: it is also a perfectly reasonable > > Debian should not require that Debian be able to understand license > terms?
No, Debian must be able to evaluate the Freeness of the license terms. However, this does not mean that every single developer and user of Debian must be able to understand the license. > I just don't believe that having one or two "trusted" people fluent in > a language is a substitute for the debian-legal list, where we have an > entire list of such people. Debian is not capable of exercising the > level of licensing caution it attempts to maintain, with licenses written > in languages other than English. This I can understand. I agree that the license would receive less scrutiny. > If Debian can't deterine with confidence that a work is legal and DFSG-free > to distribute, it doesn't distribute. Agreed. However, I don't think that the lack of a binding English translation would always make it impossible for Debian to determine with confidence that a work is legal and DFSG-free. It would, of course, make it harder. In the particular case of this license, furthermore, we only need to determine if the ability to convert to the GPL is valid; we then have a binding English license to the work, which would already be known to be Free. > I also fear the general case, where a notable percentage of software in > the archive has licenses which are only binding in a random language, and > it becomes unreasonable to avoid that software. Currently, a fluent English > speaker with some background in reading licenses should be able to understand > /usr/share/doc/*/copyright (if d-legal can't make sense of an English > license, it probably doesn't belong in the archive, either); that would break > down. I agree that this case is not ideal. However, I also don't think it would be a good idea for Debian to have a general policy of not accepting licenses without a binding English translation. - Josh Triplett
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