Re: Question about license

Soren Stoutner <[email protected]> Tue, 17 Sep 2024 15:08:22 -0700

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.mentors,gmane.linux.debian.devel.legal
Organization	Debian
Message-ID	<4853949.TsoHPkkYJ4@soren-desktop>

Hilmar,

On Tuesday, September 17, 2024 2:56:53 PM MST Preuße, Hilmar wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> before pushing a broken package to the NEW queue: I started again 
> working on #698886 and have a here a package, which is quite lintian 
> clean. What causes headache is the license "Modified MIT license".
> 
> The following paragraph has been added by the author:
> 
> <snip>
>      If you copy or distribute a modified version of this Software, the 
> entire
>      resulting derived work must be given a different name and 
> distributed under
>      the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.
> <snip>
> 
> Except that it is a pure MIT license. Could that cause issues?

I have copied the Debian Legal mailing list as this question is most directed 
toward their expertise.

My initial impression is that this custom addition to the license isn’t a DFSG 
problem.  It contains two parts:

1.  It requires that any derivatives be given a different name.  This is 
similar to trademark restrictions.  Many, many packages in Debian have 
trademark restrictions that require derivatives to have different names (so end 
users are not confused as to which is the original package) and that is not 
considered a DFSG problem.

2.  It requires that derivatives must use the same license.  That isn’t a 
standard part of a MIT (Expat) license, but it is a standard part of other 
DFSG licenses (like the GPL), so I don’t think it would be a DFSG problem.

-- 
Soren Stoutner
[email protected]

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