Interface files licensing

2015-06-28 Thread Abou Al Montacir 
Dear All,

I'm member of Debian Pascal packaging team. We are packaging Lazarus, a
multi-platform RAD tool for the Free Pascal Compiler.

During recent review of the source files, we discovered that one file
[1] seems to have a problematic licensing.

This file is licensed under the APSL V2 [2] which looks incompatible
with DFSG.

However, this file is a pure interface file, only defining data types
and MACOS file format. There is absolutely no instruction code. It is
exactly equivalent to a C header file for any library that does not
include any function definition.

My own understanding is that this kind of interfacing files are not
covered by intellectual property as long as the interface itself is
publicly available.

Can you please confirm this understanding or advice how one can deal
with such kind of licensing issue?

Thanks in advance for your valuable help.

PS: Please keep Debian Pascal Devel Team list in CC.

[1] http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg
-pascal/lazarus.git/tree/components/fpdebug/macho.pas
[2] http://www.opensource.apple.com/apsl/
-- 
Cheers,
Abou Al Montacir


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Re: Licensing questions regarding distribution of the raspberry pi platform bundled with proprietary software

2015-06-28 Thread Charles MacKay 
Thank you all for your responses.

I am pleased to hear that it seems like I am in the clear from a legal
standpoint. I am not planning on removing java, so I will remove those
packages.

Thank you for your input, and thank you for making a useful, and legally
compliant product.

-Charles

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 3:18 AM, Admin  wrote:

> Paul
>
> Thank you for your interest in Raspberry Pi.
>
> We cannot provide legal advice, but our understanding is that it is legal
> to distribute the Raspbian image as-is. Note that special terms apply to
> the use of Java in "non-general purpose compute" platforms such as kiosks;
> we do not believe this applies in this case.
>
> Regards
>
> Nicola Early
> Administrator
> Raspberry Pi
> nic...@raspberrypi.org
>
> -Original Message-
> From: paul.is.w...@gmail.com [mailto:paul.is.w...@gmail.com] On Behalf Of
> Paul Wise
> Sent: 24 June 2015 06:33
> To: Charles MacKay
> Cc: Admin; debian-legal@lists.debian.org
> Subject: Re: Licensing questions regarding distribution of the raspberry
> pi platform bundled with proprietary software
>
> On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 5:28 AM, Charles MacKay wrote:
>
> > What legal grounds do I need to adhere by to make sure that is legal
> > for me to sell my raspberry pi system and software bundled with it to
> others?
>
> Anything from Debian main should be legal to distribute as long as you
> also distribute the source packages.
>
> Since you are using a Debian derivative and not using Debian, you'll need
> to review the parts that have been added to or changed from Debian. The
> Raspbian people can probably tell you about their policies but I imagine
> that Raspbian main has the same policy as Debian main.
> So you should check if any packages not from Raspbian main are installed
> and review their copyright information.
>
> https://www.raspbian.org/
>
> To make things more complicated, as I understand it, the Raspbian images
> distributed by Raspberry Pi are modified from the Rasbian distributed by
> Rasbian themselves. I personally don't know what changes were made,
> hopefully the Raspberry Pi folks will answer you.
>
> --
> bye,
> pabs
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
>