Like most legal things I think its a question of intent. Debian has certainly had many situations where there were "problems" in the repos and past releases that remain uncorrected. Sometimes the legal questions are very fuzzy and sometimes people just aren't aware that there is a problem. If its clear that you are trying to address problems then you are in a much better position than if you are clearly and willfully disregarding the terms of someone's license.
I think we have to accept, as a matter of course, that we are going to have problems sneak into the repo. Removing a revision from SVN is extraordinarily difficult and *any* user of SVN is going to have that problem. I think, for our purposes, we can regard SVN as a development tool and not a distribution tool (though that's not exactly true its a question of intent and common industry practices). We should make a real effort to not knowingly include glaring license problems in an official release. With all these things, remember IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) but I have been around Debian for a while and its a veritable cornucopia of licensing squabbling... for what that's worth. Tim Ruppert wrote: > +1 - that makes great sense Ean - thanks for laying it out like a towel. > > I have a question about this legal stuff - does only having licensing issues > in the repo for a little bit count any less against us? Does it actually > open us up to anything in any way? I really don't know the answer, so I'd > love to here other thoughts on the topic. > > I'm assuming that as soon as it's checked in, we're screwed, which means to > me that we must do better at not to putting them into the repo at all - > instead of cleaning them up in the future as this has happened numerous times > on this effort. Anyways, any info on the matter would help me - so thanks in > advance. > -- Ean Schuessler, CTO [email protected] 214-720-0700 x 315 Brainfood, Inc. http://www.brainfood.com
