Re: *URGENT* ftpparse licensing issue

Casey Allen Shobe <[email protected]> writes:

> Who besides Debian users, who have chosen by the act of using Debian to
> exclude themselves from the evils of GPL-incompatibility and thus should
> understand that they will not be able to use all software and will run
> into these problems time and time again, cares?

Debian does not exclude software which is not GPL-compatible.  The
previous poster was mistaken.  Quite a bit of GPL-incompatible software is
in Debian (OpenAFS, for instance).  Debian only excludes software that
does not comply with the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which ftpparse
uncontroversially is (djb does not grant any permission, at least that
I've seen, to distribute modified versions).

The way in which the original request was phrased was very unfortunate and
highly unlikely to result in anything other than the flames that did
result.  Really, ftpparse is just something that Debian isn't going to be
willing to distribute except as part of non-free.  There are various
reasons for that that people are going to agree with or not, and there's
little to no point in arguing about any of them since we've all heard them
and we've all individually made up our minds.

I've never seen any sign that djb was interested in changing any of his
licensing, so I would have recommended that the original poster not have
wasted their time asking.

> It's not acceptable to proclaim to various authors of respected software
> that their product must be relicensed, and NOW.

I agree.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email protected])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>