On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Ben Finney <ben+deb...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > Mackenzie Morgan <maco...@gmail.com> writes: >> The license is as follows: >> You may make copies of SPIM for your own use and modify those copies. >> >> All copies of SPIM must retain my name and copyright notice. >> >> You may not sell SPIM or distribute SPIM in conjunction with a >> commercial product or service without the expressed written consent of >> James Larus. > > This grants no permission to redistribute. What license from the > copyright holder does the Debian project have to redistribute this in > ‘non-free’? > > If the answer is “nothing explicit”, then the default copyright > restrictions prevent the Debian project from redistributing the work at > all.
Looks like a Debian person contacted him about this a long time ago: http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/non-free/s/spim/current/copyright IMO, the statement isn't particularly clear and I would not want Debian to rely on it. I'd suggest that upstream should provide a clear statement for debian/copyright that Debian (and Ubuntu) is allowed to distribute spim. It is a shame he refuses to change the license to something free (as mentioned on IRC). If he has a PGP/GPG key to clearsign the statement with, that would be good too. -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
