Re: Why we must ship at least some licenses (was: Manoj, ...

[john@dhh.gt.org]

manoj writes:
> I see no reason to bloat every package like that. We are not required to
> (point 2 in the list above satisfies all legal requirements). I think
> that we should actually move the copyrights to the verbatim section, and
> move to point 2 above. As long as they are on every debian system, and on
> every cd and archive, we have done.

I don't think you can say this of every license.  Some licenses say things
like "You must include this license in every distribution of the program".
I think that by 'distribution' the authors of these licenses mean a .deb or
a .rpm or a .tgz, not Debian or Red Hat or Slackware.  It should not be
possible to get a .deb of a program published under such a license without
also getting the license.

> I definitely do not have thqat much space to waste.

Neither do I.

> One copy on every machine, cd, and ftp archive should be enough. And on
> the CD and ftp archive, they should sit in the verbatim section where
> they belong.

Yes, but in the case of software published under licenses of the above
mentioned type, I think we must see to it that that copy is there, even if
the machine is not running Debian.
-- 
John Hasler
john@dhh.gt.org (John Hasler)
Dancing Horse Hill
Elmwood, WI