Re: [ProgSoc] PINE Being Free?

[Matt <matt@nospam.progsoc.uts.edu.au>]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2002 at 10:31:46AM +1000, Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale wrote:
> At 10:12pm on the 17th of April, Anand Kumria wrote:

>> Using the same liblockfile library to ensure NFS works okay. Having a version
>> of pine in /usr/bin/ is a violation of the licence!

> There is nothing in the Pine license that prevents installation in
> /usr/bin.  If I keep quoting http://www.washington.edu/pine/legal/
> I'll have repasted the entire thing, but basically locally modified
> copies of Pine are permitted, and the distribution of patch files
> are permitted, so the practice of distributing a source-only .deb of
> pine with appropriate Debian patches is perfectly in accordance with
> the license.

a) there is no such thing as a source only .deb (sources come in .dsc,
.oirg.tar.gz and .diff.gz files).

b) there is no handling in debian for source only packages (although
some packages do provide source/headers as part of the package, there
is no way to automagicaly build these).

> Even so, there is no mention of restrictions on installation
> directory in the license. We *could* make a local copy, but we would
> not even need to exercise this right, because merely copying the
> unpatched binaries to /usr/bin/ does not violate the license.

sure, but what about the paths to all the other data files et al it is
looking for? debian requires stuff to be installed in /usr if it is a
package. ie it has to conform to the LSB (and a few debian specific
extras).

>> As well as restricting distributing modified binaries it also restricts
>> binaries on the same media. So if you are selling a CD (or giving a friend
>> a floppy disk) the license of the software must be compatible [*] with Pine.

> The licenses of included software do not have to be compatible with
> the Pine license. They must be of a type allowed by the Pine
> license, however.  Specifically, they must be "free of charge,
> non-proprietary, or shareware". You can even charge for the CD. This
> explicitly covers everything in debian-main. Including Pine in a CD
> which also contains the archives of debian-non-free falls under
> option 1 of the distribution clause, which states "Redistribution of
> this release is permitted... In free-of-charge or at-cost
> distributions by non-profit concerns".

the GPL doesnt necessarily fall under "free of charge,
non-proprietary, or shareware".

> In plain English: you can make a CD containing Mozilla, GCC, Emacs,
> Python, Perl and Pine and charge hundreds of dollars for it and not
> violate any license. You can also make a CD containing your own
> proprietary software and Pine, but you can't charge more than the
> cost of producing the CD.

not necessarily true. see above.

> The fundamental intent of the license is that you can do what you
> like with the software on your own system as long as it's labelled
> as modified, you can't distribute the binaries, and you can't sell
> it with commercial apps on a CD. That's not Free according to
> Debian's guidelines or the FSF, but it's pretty free, and Progsoc's
> use of it is perfectly appropriate.

i doubt you can state unequivocally wether somethign is acceptable for
progsoc, i would have thought that was the domain of the exec, or if
far reaching enough a quorum of the club at a general meeting.

> Computer scientists spend way too much time fussing over licenses.

tell that to dmitry.. a cavalier attitude to the very thing that is
the core value of your industry is a little disturbing.


	matt

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