Hi, there are two available layouts for French Dvorak keyboards. One of them, which is the cause of my concern, was written by Francis Leboutte, and was originally distributed as a (non-free) Windows driver.
I started then to make another implementation of the same mapping, for X11. It soon turned out that the mapping forces to use dead keys, which sucks, so I used a variant that removes this need. Several people asked me of a French Dvorak layout, so I started to distribute it under the X11 license, and it finally ended up in the official X.org tarballs. Later, Francis Leboutte started to license the *layout* (not only the Windows driver) under a clearly non-free license (CC-NC-ND), and asked X.org to remove the driver, arguing that the X11-licensed version is illegal, being a derivative work of his layout. The X.org guys finally agreed to distribute the original variant instead, with the following licensing header: // Licence : X11 (the layout itself is released under CC-NC-ND licence) It is my opinion that, in European law, the copyright on a keyboard mapping does not affect that of its implementation, because, among other things, of the interoperability exception – in the same way a function prototype is not subject to copyright while the function itself is. Francis Leboutte believes the opposite and claims that drivers implementing a derivative layout are illegal. I don’t think this disagreement will resolve, since it could only happen in a court, and we both have better things to do than suing each other for a keyboard mapping. However, the Francis Leboutte mapping is now included in Debian. This means we should settle on this issue: if we consider it non-free, we must remove this layout (and all derivatives) from the distribution; if we don’t, there’s no barrier against including some variants. I’d tend to say we should opt for the conservative approach and remove them; despite the fact that I like the mapping, we shouldn’t include software with such an unclear copyright status. Thoughts anyone? -- .''`. Debian 5.0 "Lenny" has been released! : :' : `. `' Last night, Darth Vader came down from planet Vulcan and told `- me that if you don't install Lenny, he'd melt your brain.
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