Manoj Srivastava wrote: > > >>"Jakob" == Jakob Bøhm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Jakob> 2. Mechanical filtering on specific common issues including > Jakob> the meta-issue "other problems" becomes possible, e.g. when > Jakob> creating cd-roms or mirrors, or when setting up a > Jakob> fool-proofing filter on apt to protect oneself from accidentally > Jakob> installing the wrong thing. > > > Someone got convicted in Texas for doing something vaguely > similar, on the grounds they were practicing law without a > licence. In fact, you shall be opening yourself to liability in the > US, since this is close to giving legal advice to people. > > This is one of the resons we have not previously classified > the non-free packages. > > manoj > ps: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. Please consult a > real lawyer licenced to practice in your jursdiction.
I am not a lawyer either. What I was proposing was, that package maintainers would (by some future policy change not directly related to non-us) be required to state the terms under which they were offering their work (the package) in mechanical terms, just as DVD authors state in mechanical terms which areas of the globe are licensed to use the copyrighted movie. Another way of looking at it is that Debian is *already* doing some of this by dividing packages into main, contrib and non-free, I am simply suggesting one way to add more granularity. The underlying idea is, that very few people have the time to manually review every /usr/share/doc/x/copyright file on their system and this would allow them to perform fundamental checks much more easily. Another underlying idea is that not all users have the exact same licensing needs as those expressed by DFSG. Some may be home users who can accept "no-commercial-use" while others may be maintainers of non-free packages who consequently cannot accept GPL libraries as build dependencies. -- This message is hastily written, please ignore any unpleasant wordings, do not consider it a binding commitment, even if its phrasing may indicate so. Its contents may be deliberately or accidentally untrue. Trademarks and other things belong to their owners, if any.
