Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

Titel: Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: E. Gabriella Coleman

Vom Netzwerk:

This is simply part of the “natural” social landscape of most free software projects.
     Markel: what is your opinion about making a recommendation in policy that packages in non-free indicate why they’re in non-free, and what general class of restrictions the license has?
     dangmang: well, I am not too keen on mandating people do more work for non-free packages. but it may be a good practice suggestion.
     dangmang: Then I would suggest that the ideal approach would be to enumerate all the categories you want to handle first, giving requirements to be in those categories.
     Markel: true. could the proposal be worded so that new uploads would have to have it? [ … ]
     dangmang: You don’t want to list what issues they fail; you want to list what criteria they meet. [ … ]
     dangmang: X-Nonfree-Permits: autobuildable, modifiable, portable.
     the developers-reference should mention it, and policy can recommend it, for starters.
     dangmang: we need to have well defined tags.
     mt3t: “gfdl,” “firmware.” [ … ]
     mt3t: No “You may not port this to _____.”
     mt3t: You wouldn’t believe what people put in their licenses. :)
     Markel: right. [ … ] I think I’ll start on the general outline of the proposal, and flesh things out, and hopefully people will have comments to make in policy too when I start the procedure.
    More formal legal avenues are also employed. Debian developers may contact the original author (called the upstream maintainer) of a piece of software that they are considering including and maintaining in Debian. Many of these exchanges concern licensing problems that would keep the software out of Debian. In this way, non-Debian developers also undergo informal legal training. Sometimes developers act in the capacity of legal advocates, convincing these upstream maintainers to switch to aDFSG-compliant license, which is necessary if the software is to be included in Debian.
    The developers who hold Debian-wide responsibilities must in general be well versed in the subtleties of F/OSS licensing. The FTP masters, who integrate new software packages into the main repository, must check every single package license for DFSG compatibility. Distributing a package illegally could leave Debian open to lawsuits.
    One class of Debian developers has made legal matters their obsession. These aficionados contribute prolifically to the legal pulse of Debian in debian-legal—a mailing list that because of its legal esoterica and large number of posts, is not for the faint of heart. For those who are interested in keeping abreast but do not have time to read every message posted on debian-legal, summaries link to it in a weekly newsletter,
Debian Weekly News
. Below, I quote a fraction (about one-fifth) of the legal news items that were reported in
Debian Weekly News
during the course of 2002 (the numbers are references linking to mailing list threads or news stories):
    GNU FDL a non-free License? Several [22] people are [23] discussing whether the [24] GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) is a free license or not. If the GFDL is indeed considered a non-free license, this would [25] render almost all KDE and many other well known packages non-free since they use the GNU FDL for the documentation. Additionally, here’s an old [26] thread from debian-legal, which may shed some light on the issue. 6
    RFC: LaTeX Public Project License . Claire Connelly [4] reported that the LaTeX Project is in the process of considering changes to the LaTeX Project Public License. She tried to summarize some of the concerns that Debian people have expressed regarding the changes. Hence, Frank Mittelbach asked for reviews of the draft of version 1.3 of the [5] LaTeX Public Project License rather than of the current version (1.2). 7
    Enforcing Software Licenses . Lawrence Rosen, general counsel for the [20] Open Source Initiative, wrote an [21] article about the enforceability of software licenses. In particular, he discusses the issue of proving that somebody assented to be bound by the terms of a contract so that those terms will be enforced by a court. Authors who wish to be able to enforce license terms against users of their source code or compiled programs may find this interesting. 8
    Problematic BitKeeper License . Branden Robinson [3] pointed out that some of us may be exposed