[sword-devel] dirent.[ch]: licence/copyright issues

[Jonathan Marsden]

Dmitrijs Ledkovs wrote:

>>>   Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
>>>   documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided
>>>   that this copyright and permissions notice appear in all copies and
>>>   derivatives, and that no charge may be made for the software and its
>>>   documentation except to cover cost of distribution.

>>    *Free Redistribution*
>>
>>    The license of a Debian component may not restrict any party from
>>    selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software
>>    distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license
>>    may not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

>> Does that go well with "no charge may be made for the software and its
>> documentation except to cover cost of distribution."?
>> I'm not sure this is GPL compatible either.

> Good point. No clue. There have been no replies on debian-legal yet.

Intuitively (which is always a dangerous way to deal with legal wording,
I realize!), the "no charge may be made ... except ..." clause is
clearly a restriction on all parties on selling this software.

I've met this kind of thing before, though I forget what package it was
(!), and I am 99% sure (though I am also not a lawyer!) that this kind
of language pushes code into non-free or metaverse repositories -- that
is, it is not DFSG-free to restrict how much one can charge for selling
the software.

In this case, though, I believe this file is only needed for Windows,
since under Linux and *BSD we have /usr/include/dirent.h already.

Therefore, we can simply remove it from the tarball in a get-orig-source
rule.  Are there any objections to my doing this?

Jonathan