Comment 38 for bug 6792

Revision history for this message
In , Glenn Maynard (glenn-zewt) wrote : Re: Illegal code distribution from http://people.debian.org/~cowboy/debian/x3270/

(-admin dropped; nothing in this reply needs to go there)

On Mon, May 02, 2005 at 01:34:32AM +0100, Andrew Saunders wrote:
> On Mon, 11 April 2005, Richard A Nelson wrote:
>
> >> It seem to me the the situation can be cleared by sending few emails
> >> and instead the pacage was removed.
>
> > You've only read about the most recent issue... This has been battled
> > for *many* years and the DFSG crew is growing more vigilant - at the
> > expense of the pragmatists amongs us :(

If "pragmatism" is "I don't care whether a work is Free or not", you're
in the wrong project. (No, really. Debian is about Free Software, and
if that's so low a priority for you that you'll label is an "expense",
you're really in the wrong place.)

But if "pragmatism" is "I don't care whether I might get myself or the project
sued by distributing something", you might be more at home with a warez
group. :)

That said, I see a license at http://x3270.bgp.nu/license.html. I don't
know if there's any indication that some source files in the distribution
are not, in fact, available under that license, but I wouldn't consider
simply lacking a notice on a source file to be an indication of much of
anything, as that license seems to claim to apply to the "x3270" package
as a whole. On the other hand, I can't find any licensing information at
all in the tarball itself, which at the very least isn't a good sign of
the upstream author's licensing diligence.

(Sorry for not spending the time to review #248853 in full, but the derisive,
knee-jerk dismissal of legal issues at its start--a year ago, to be fair--puts
me in little mood to read the thread much further. :)

--
Glenn Maynard