Re: License review: tarsnap

Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:29:03 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.legal
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

"Andrew M.A. Cater" <[email protected]> writes:

> On Tue, Feb 04, 2025 at 11:58:00PM +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>> All,
>> 
>> Is the license below acceptable for inclusion into 'non-free'?  It is
>> claimed to cover the tarsnap software, see
>> https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap and https://www.tarsnap.com/ for
>> background.
>> 
>> Regarding RFP/ITP status, there is now a Salsa pipeline building the
>> Debian package:
>> 
>> https://salsa.debian.org/jas/tarsnap/
>> 
>> It seems to build.  If the license is deemed acceptable for inclusion
>> into Debian 'non-free' I plan to upload it, closing this old RFP bug.  I
>> am guessing that the unusual license may have been regarded as a
>> blocker.
>> 
>
> I'm going to be *very* picky here: a restrictive reading of this might
> suggest that only the *exact* software without any modificatin can
> be distributed at all.
>
> Packaging the software for Debian amounts to modification: minimal
> modification but modification anyway. That presumably means we 
> can't distribute it at all, even in non-free.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Why would packaging software in Debian necessarily amount to
modification of it?

Aren't there several packages in 'non-free' (or 'non-free-firmware' for
that matter) that only permits verbatim distribution without
modification?

I thought that was acceptable in 'non-free'.

Manuals licensed under GFDL with Invariant Sections comes to mind here.
We can't modify those parts but they are in 'non-free'.

/Simon

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