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

[Gregory Hellings]

On Apr 24, 2009, at 1:27, Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> 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?

No objection here. I know we use it in BibleTime, but there is no  
reason we can't try to get a copy from elsewhere or use other methods  
to do the same thing. There has been talk of using other (for us that  
would mean Qt) implementations to do the same thing that dirent does  
so as to be more UTF aware.

--Greg

>
>
> Jonathan
>
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