Re: License of the contrib plugins

* will guaraldi 

| On Mon, 4 Apr 2005, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
| > 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.

Yes, I noticed that and this is good.  What's even better is pyblosxom
is under the MIT license and not the python license, since you can't
license anything but python under the python license.  (So it should
be removed from the list of «ok» licenses in my previous mail.) 

| 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.

This is great to hear.

| > 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.

Ok.  Since pyblosxom is a lot more useful with them, I think I'm going
to package them once we have them cleaned up.

| 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?

Probably on the scale of a month or two.  I don't know, since I'm not
a release manager.  Sarge is being frozen now, and I _think_ all the
holdups are now out of the way so we can actually get a release out
soon.

(And etch should take less time, hopefully.)

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen                                                        ,''`.
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are      : :' :
                                                                      `. `' 
                                                                        `-  


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