Comment 6 for bug 13050

On Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 09:58:21AM +0100, Loïc Minier wrote:
> Marco d'Itri <email address hidden> - Fri, Jan 21, 2005:

> > Do you suggest removing from the archive all packages whose licenses
> > impose uncommon restrictions or just this one?

> In this software the problem is two folds, some parts of the software
> are clearly free, and some other parts are a fork of some code under
> APSL 2. Which leaves two options: rewriting the non-free part, or
> splitting in two packages, one for contrib and one for non-free.

I don't really think it's acceptable to move half of gnome into contrib.
Fortunately, if the package dependencies of libhowl0 are accurate, this
shouldn't be required; mdnsresponder isn't a dependency of libhowl0, only a
recommends: which could in theory be weakened to a suggests:.

You indicated on IRC that the library functionality isn't very useful
without the mdnsresponder package. I think it isn't very useful to a lot of
users even *with* the mdnsresponder package, so I don't think we'd be lying
to ourselves by weakening this to a suggests:.

> I think some software was already built on the libs provided by this
> package[1], so it is not trivial at all (indirect dependencies make
> some packages depend on it via the shlibs mecanism).

> Which makes me wonder whether APSL 2 is acceptable for non-free?

The APSL 2.0 allows free redistribution, and allows us to make the
modifications necessary to maintain the package as long as we publish our
source (which we obviously will). This license would be fine in non-free.

Because the lib would need to stay in main instead of contrib, however, the
source package would still have to be split to allow this.

--
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer