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

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Sean Kellogg skellogg@gmail.com wrote:

On Saturday 21 July 2007 07:30:32 am Mike Bird wrote:

I note that you characterize trying to bring Debian into compliance with the law as being unproductive.

Mr. Towns may not be saying that... but I am. I say that sitting around thinking of all the billions of ways that Debian could possibly be breaking the law in any of the thousands of jurisdictions on the globe is a waste of time and energy. Issues ought to be addressed as they arise, not because someone is bored and looking to pick a fight.

In that case, there is no point in worrying about most licensing at all. The possibility that any one person is going to get in trouble for any particular software is so small that we might as well ignore it. In particular, I am guessing that you would not have supported removing KDE from Debian back when Qt was not GPL'd.

The problem is that we are then gambling with other people's money. Coupling that with the wide range of wacky things that copyright holders have done in the past makes me consider any decision more seriously. Remember, for this code in particular, the copyright holder tried to take it back out of circulation. Normally you might rely on the good will of the copyright holder to not enforce strange clauses in the license, but you can not make that assumption here.

Cheers, Walter Landry wlandry@ucsd.edu

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