Re: Why is firebird in Debian? (original) (raw)

On Saturday 21 July 2007 02:35, Anthony Towns wrote:

On Fri, Jul 20, 2007 at 10:19:03PM -0700, Mike Bird wrote:

It appears that You are distributing firebird2-common in violation of IPL section 3.6, and therefore in violation of copyright law in many jurisdictions.

Okay, so the extent of your complaint is that you don't think there's sufficient notice of how to get the source; and that you're not a user of a version of firebird2 let alone a version of it for which the source actually isn't trivially available, nor a contributor to it upstream, which are the only two cases for which you'd have any basis to actually complain?

No, I'm saying that it appears that Debian is in violation of copyright law in many jurisdictions. I note that you have not denied the fact. There may or may not be other violations. It suffices for this argument that Debian is in apparent violation of copyright law in many jurisdictions.

If so, great, whatever, but I'm not going to spend my time seeing how many ways you can come up with to be daft about legal issues. If you want to contribute to Debian, find something productive to do about analysing licenses, rather than trying to find ways to define everything you don't like as non-free or illegal.

I note that you characterize notice of apparent violation of copyright law in many jurisdictions as "being daft about legal issues". You will no doubt appreciate how such an attitude on the part of a leading DD tends to undermine the foundations of the GPL. I note that you characterize trying to bring Debian into compliance with the law as being unproductive. Are we to assume that meek acceptance of your misinterpretations of licenses would be considered "productive"?

--Mike Bird

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