On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 12:42:22PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote: > Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>>"Jakob" == Jakob Bøhm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Jakob> no-source (example: Netscape, opera) > > Jakob> no-commercial-use (example: zyxel) > > Jakob> payment-required (example: opera<5.0) > > Jakob> contains-crypto (example: RSA, gnupg) > > Jakob> uses-us-patent (example: IDEA, GIF) > > Jakob> uses-non-us-patent (example: IDEA) > > Jakob> contaminates-result-license (example: old bison) > > Jakob> no-sell-copies (problem for cd-rom or pre-installed system) > > Jakob> requires-other-sw (example: wrapper script which is not itself DFSG) > > Jakob> requires-specific-hw (example: driver licensed only for specific hw) > > Jakob> other-problems (any problems not listed, alone or in addition) > > > > 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.
[*] > In a non-free package I maintain, I explain in debian/copyright why the > package is in non-free, to aid CD-ROM distributors trying to decide > whether they can include the package. Does this mean that I have to add > a disclaimer about this not being legal advice as well? > > Should a note to this effect be included in policy section 2.1.6? In > general, I'd like to see packages with non-free licences that "look > free" to the unpractised eye explain in debian/copyright why they don't > meet the DFSG; I think there was a discussion along these lines on > debian-legal a few months back. Perhaps enumerating the DFSG sections the license fails would be sufficient, at least for package manager front-ends and CDrom distributors? Personally I would like a slightly finer-grained choice for those systems I have where I even ALLOW non-free at all (mostly games BTW) and I can tolerate certain section failures (I can probably allow failures against DFSG 234 for games, for the sake of playing said games at a LAN party) [*]And since we already have the DFSG enumerated into sections and use it as a metric to decide what is main/contrib and what is non-free, we can at least mention (perhaps verbally, perhaps as a new header) which sections the license fails. And then package manager front-ends could use this information to show/hide parts of non-free. But for certain other restrictions such as no-commercial-use the DFSG is not granular enough (But it should NOT be that granular - any use restriction at all is sufficient for it) and a second breakdown of licenses would be convenient, but I'm not so sure this should be something Debian itself should do given the recent arguments about giving legal advice. Still, I think this would be more helpful for those of our users who want to use non-free. -- Ferret
