Le Tue, Aug 22, 2006 at 08:53:26PM +0200, Adam Borowski a écrit : > On Tue, Aug 22, 2006 at 08:37:30AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote: > > > > Last week-end I was told by a DD that the 4-clause BSD licence was > > non-free... Do you have any link in the archives which proves the > > contrary? This is very interesting for me as I am interested in bringing > > to Debian an unofficial package whose software is under this licence... > > I have a very urgent piece of work to do, so I won't dig the archives right > now, but for example, openssl uses these words and is in main (although not > GPL-compatible). Out of the top of my brain, http://fsf.org/licenses/, > although it's a non-Debian source.
Hi Adam, Anderew, Bruce and Stephen. Thank you for your answers. I sent the question to debian-devel, because what will count in the end is what the persons behind ftpmaster@ think about the license in 2006 for new packages. In particular, I fear being objected that the 4-clause BSD-like licences are too easy to infringe to be safely used for programs im main. If one sells a Debian CD, and prints the list of included packages in an advertisement without acknowledging the copyight holder, he infringes the licence. Which means that distributors of Debian CDs should better read all licences before mentioning the names of packages? Of course, some programs may have made their way in main with 4-clauses licences, but I remember disucssions on -devel about other licences for which there is status quo: no removal, but no upload... In the meantime, I asked the upstream developper to kindly relicence his work, but it is his employer which holds the copyright, so it is about asking a university to removed its name from somewhere, which can become a herculean task. Although the universities of Utah and California/SanFransisco have wisely suppressed the advertisement clauses from their works, this does not apply to other copyright holders who used the original BSD licence as a template (nor the work was related to the BSD operating system itself). But if the relicencing is not accepted, I will get the package sponsored anyway. All this mess is to avoid my sponsor to re-upload in case the package is rejected because it is not targeted to the correct category. Have a nice day, -- Charles Plessy http://charles.plessy.org Wako, Saitama, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]