Joseph Carter wrote: > I think the author's license is the only reasonable measure of use > restrictions. Outside the US I'm free to use LZW, RSA, mp3, etc to my > heart's content. Inside the US all crypto should be considered non-free > by the above definition because the US crypto controls are essentially to > prevent US citizens from having access to it without directly banning it. > And they'd like to ban it if they could.
The problem is, I don't know if it's legally safe to ignore use restrictions when distributing. I also think that packages which are known to have encumbrances should be marked in some way, because we make a number of promises about what people can do with stuff in main. > > To support this: As an excercise, try writing any program that you can > > *prove* does not infringe on any patents. > > hello world maybe? Prove it :-) > > > I propose that the above language be changed to: > > > > > > `Non-free' contains packages which are not compliant with the DFSG. > > > > This will put all GIF-creating packages in main. Is that what we want? > > non-US/main actually, given the scope of the LZW patent. I have no > problems with this at all and if I didn't second the proposal yet (I'm > pretty sure I did but it's been a long week and it's only Monday) I'm > doing so now. => But currently, all of non-US/main is free for use and distribution inside the US. Putting GIF-creating packages in there would change that. I think we need some kind of map of which packages should go where, and what kinds of subdistributions we want. Richard Braakman
