On Sun, Aug 16, 1998 at 07:49:59PM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote: > > The proposal goes back to an idea by Raul Miller, I've seen it on some list, > don't remember where.
Richard pointed out that it was him, so here is the mail I meant: Richard Braakman: > I don't think we can do that. Already the practice of shipping debs > without a copy of the GPL is legally dubious; fortunately we can point > at the copy in base-files, which is in the same archive and is > guaranteed to be installed on all systems. > > We can still adopt this rule, if we change policy so that GPL'd packages > must include a copy of the GPL, rather than referring to it. > > An alternative might be a technical change to dpkg: "shared" files, > which can be installed by any number of packages, as long as their > contents (md5sum) are identical. That would allow us to ship the > GPL with every package, while still having only one copy on the system. > (Still in /usr/doc/copyright/GPL, presumably) > > I think this feature would have value in other contexts too; it might > eliminate the smaller "-common" packages. > > Richard Braakman -- "Rhubarb is no Egyptian god." Debian GNU/Linux finger brinkmd@ Marcus Brinkmann http://www.debian.org master.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] for public PGP Key http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Marcus.Brinkmann/ PGP Key ID 36E7CD09
