Re: Leadership, effects on Debian and open source community
I'm way behind in reading the debian lists, but...
On Fri, 4 Dec 1998, Joey Hess wrote:
> Raul Miller wrote:
> > Or maybe you expect that people will "just know" that, if they happen
> > to mention a popular piece of software, that they've legally obligated
> > themselves to present a formal announcement?
>
> We expect people to read the license. I don't feel we have any obligation to
> make it clearer for them.
<snip>
Hmmmm....
http://cdimage.debian.org says:
Debian 2.0 CD Images
Do you actually want to download a copy of the Official Debian CDs ?
Unless you are intending to burn numerous CDs, which you want to be able
to label as ``Official Debian 2.0'' CDs, then the answer is almost
certainly ``NO''.
<snip>
However, for CD vendors the answer is ``YES''. They then procede to
obtain a copy of the Official Debian CD, duplicate it, and distribute
it. If we expect that before distributing the CD copies they will
examine the CD contents closely enough to discover the licenses, and
then to read each license (which involves extracting the licenses from
the package files, either by creating a debian system and installing all
the packages or by some other means), we should probably tell them so on
the web site.
If, OTOH, (and I think this is the case) we don't expect them to extract
and read all the individual licenses, we ought to alert them to areas
where distribution of the CDs involves some legal obligation which they
wouldn't otherwise expect -- such as the triggering of advertising clauses
if they mention certain packages, programs, or features. Perhaps a
section about this needs to be added to the information on the web site.
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