Tue, 23 Sep 2008

Slightly dramatized...

You know, that you did the right thing, when you leave the company building on your last working day, and the first thing comming to your mind is: Free at last!

postet at 20:04 into [Debian/other] permanent link

Thu, 04 Sep 2008

Debian not complying to licenses

Daniel Baumann writes, that Debian wouldn't comply to some licenses due to embeded copies of syslinux binaries in its debian-cd package. To be exact he wrote: [..] if debian-cd is embedding a syslinux binary with a different version, it must contain the sources for it [..] (accentuation by me).

And -- since both debian-cd and syslinux are licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licences 2 (as statet in its copyright file) -- he is wrong. To comply to the license it is completely okay to Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, [..]. (Section 3b).

To the best of my knowledge we do archive all sources of all uploads (even if not public accessible, ask an ftp-master for details about source-morgue). So we do comply to the license.

Update: source-morgue doesn't guarantee all sources to be present. But all the syslinux sources mentioned by Daniel are present.

PS: Of course that doesn't mean embeding a binary is okay policy wise...

PS2: In future it's planed to have snapshot.debian.org for that; don't know about the state of that, yet.

postet at 21:07 into [Debian] permanent link