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


About

Alexander Tolimar Reichle-Schmehl lives in Tuttlingen / Germany. He works as IT manager (specialized on Unix and SAN/Storage) for an international automotive supplier.

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