Re: License of the contrib plugins

On Mon, 4 Apr 2005, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
>
> I am the current maintainer of the Debian package of pyblosxom.  I took 
> over the package fairly recently and among the outstanding bugs is a 
> request to update the package to the newest version (the current version 
> in both the unstable and testing repositories is 1.0).

This is really super news!  I talked to someone (I can't remember who) 8 
months or so ago about updating the PyBlosxom package, but decided to punt 
until I fixed a bunch of issues with PyBlosxom first.  (That and I didn't 
have time to really figure out what was involved.)


> Since I'm both new as the maintainer and the contributed plugins were 
> recently split out in its own package, I decided to investigate the new 
> tarball to see if there's any problems with it.  Unfortunately, there 
> is, as many of the plugins are inappropriately (or insufficiently) 
> licensed or not licensed at all.  Plugins lacking a license are not 
> distributable at all (except by the author of the plugin), so while I'm 
> mostly worried about this in the context of Debian, pyblosxom itself may 
> be affected too.

PyBlosxom (the core) should be fine.  The entire thing is distributed 
under one license which is in the LICENSE file that comes with PyBlosxom.

One of the reasons I split off the contributed plugins pack into its own 
package is that I had no idea what the license/ownership state of the 
plugins therein were.  It needs a lot of work and it's in my queue of 
things to fix over the next few weeks.  I'm addressing the following 
issues:

   1. license on each plugin
   2. owner, author, contact information
   3. installation information
   4. version number
   5. testing all the plugins to see if they work with PyBlosxom 1.1
      and PyBlosxom 1.2 and marking them accordingly

There's a lot of work to do.  Getting there.


> Does anybody have any comments before I start tracking down the authors 
> and get patches so we can hopefully have a up-to-date version of 
> pyblosxom in sarge, which is soon to be released?

I don't think the contributed plugins are really in a state to be 
distributed by Debian given the mission you folks have.  I think it's 
better to distribute the core (which should be fine) and then tell people 
to fetch the plugins they're looking for on their own.

However, when you say "soon to be released", what does that actually mean? 
I've been a Debian user for a couple of years now and as far as I 
understand, Sarge has been "soon to be released" for a couple of years. 
Are we talking days, weeks, or months?  How much time do we have to work 
on the contributed plugins issue?

/will


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