On Sun, 20 May 2001, Radovan Garabik wrote: > ...
> > Please go ahead. If someone non-Swedish finds the software in > > Debian packages and feels it is very useful, he/she may start > > a project to translate it into English or other languages. It > > is exciting! > > However, the software will have to have a license document in English. > No. Why should debian force authors/maintainers to write licenses > in English? IIRC, the consensus of the last discussion about > non-english licenses was that the original license is legally > binding and the english translation serves only as a description > and hint about the real license for us linguistically challenged > IMHO short notice in debian/copyright in English, saying something like: > "The original license in Swedish says you can freely distribute, use and > modify the program" is enough. > FWIW, my next free software project will have a license in Esperanto If your license is in Esperanto, how can anyone in Debian be sure that your license passes DFSG? Even a translation explaining the license is difficult, unless the translated terms are also treated as having the force of the license; otherwise, a mistake in the translation could result in us putting a package in main that belongs in non-free, or worse, violating the license terms by including the software in Debian. Since English is the lingua franca of debian-legal, I think the main reason for wanting licenses in English is so that we can protect ourselves from legal troubles. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
