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