Re: Debian Weekly News - June 27th, 2000
On Thu, Jun 29, 2000 at 04:48:28PM +0200, pseelig@debian.org wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Jun 2000, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
>
> > Consider this: any reasonable person who wants to become a Debian
> > developer, can become a Debian developer. Once a developer, they can
> > contribute to the official .deb repository.
>
> Consider this: any reasonable person who would like to package
> non-free software for Debian simply *can't* because we don't allow him
> to do so even for Debian non-free.
huh? what are you talking about? we have a non-free section, and we have
several developers who only have non-free packages.
> KDE is an example for which other distributions are less prohibitive.
>
> Yes, i know about the legal problems regarding KDE, but Debian should
> IMHO be not the legal guardian for other people's right if they don't
> bother to stand up for it. The parties which have been harmed by
> breaking their rights should.
this is besides the point. if debian is safeguarding other people's
rights then that is co-incidental. the reason why KDE is not in debian
is that the license does not allow us to distribute it. unfortunately,
that's the end of the story - we have pointed this out to KDE on
numerous occasions and they have chosen not to do anything to fix the
problem (most of them seem to be in denial that there is actually a
problem).
the fact that some other distributions are ignoring the license
restrictions is also irrelevant - e.g. the fact that one person illegaly
trades copyrighted material does not make it legal for everyone else to
trade mp3s whenever they like.
> IMHO you got it completely backwards. The perspective under which the
> idea of such a kind of repository arose is probably product of the
> licensing restrictions which make Debian less attractive and useful
> than it could actually be for quite a number of *users*. Users have a
> different perspective than you have and *want* some of the stuff which
> is not allowed into Debian. The creation of such a repository is
> their way to react against the obvious censoring of software included
> with Debian.
if it can legally go in debian then the best place for it is in debian's
archives.
if not, then it's not relevant to debian. if someone else chooses to
distribute it then good otherwise, who cares? it's got nothing to do
with debian.
> Since there are quite some users who simply happily use Debian for
> it's technological merits/benefits and who don't mind using non-free
> software they'd be happy to have a repository where they can fetch for
> their Debian setup what users of other distributions can get far
> easier than Debian users.
>
> KDE is just one example of evidently *very* popular and excellent
> software which would be a perfect candidate for such a repository.
> Users are far less anal about restricted licenses than Debian and as
> it looks like some of them are fed up with Debian's pedantries.
you are confusing the issues. KDE is free software but it is not
included in debian because the license does not permit us to distribute
it, in fact the license specifically forbids us from distributing
it: "If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your
obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then
as a consequence YOU MAY NOT DISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AT ALL." (emphasis
added by me).
it is not possible to distribute the complete source for KDE ("complete
source" as defined in section 3 of the GPL) under the terms of the GPL,
so we MAY NOT DISTRIBUTE IT AT ALL.
that's what KDE's license says. that's what we have to abide by. KDE
could easily resolve this problem by mofifying the license to grant
permission to distribute it with KDE, or TrollTech could resolve it by
making the QPL compatible with the GPL. neither have bothered to do
anything even after repeated requests to fix their licensing problems.
until they do something about it, we have to abide by the terms of THEIR
license as THEY have published it.
craig
--
craig sanders
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