Debian: too free?

Posted Apr 29, 2004 10:27 UTC (Thu) by mbanck (subscriber, #9035)
In reply to: Debian: too free? by fandom
Parent article: Debian: too free?

The GPL text includes a copyright tag saying that it has to copied verbatim.

Does the '100% free' mean that all GPL programs are now excluded from Debian? I think it does.

This has been rehashed ad nauseam. The license text itself is an exception of this in order to protect the GPL'd packages.

Further, the changes in the social contract were editorial and do not change the spirit of it. It is just the Release Manager's decision that he now does not want to ignore these issues for Sarge any longer, given that a supermajority voted to clarify his interpretation of the social contract.

Michael

Debian: too free?

Posted Apr 29, 2004 16:52 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Every license (including the modified BSD license, MPL, QPL, Artistic license, etc) contains certain text that must be preserved verbatim. The GPL is not at all unique in that respect.

Debian: too free?

Posted Apr 29, 2004 22:05 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

That's not actually true. The ability to produce derivatives of the GPL would not allow people to modify the license under which they received the code, just as changing the copyright tag in the document would not make it legal to do so.

This is purely a matter of RMS not wanting his license-writing work to be bent to different ends by users (i.e. copyright owners).

On the other hand, Debian packages don't, in general, include the GPL document itself; that is in /usr/share/common-licenses, and is distributed "along with" Debian, but not part of Debian; since Debian can't do anything to the document other than distribute it verbatim, it doesn't really make sense to consider it part of Debian. Debian packages include copyright notices which refer to but do not include the GPL.