Bug#883731: audacious: Debian packaging has incorrect license

[Nicholas D Steeves]

Hi Francesco,

On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 11:37:46PM +0100, Francesco Poli wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Dec 2017 16:39:28 -0500 Nicholas D Steeves wrote:
> 
> [...]
> > This is one of the reasons the FSF demands copyright
> > assignment for their projects...they want to be able to relicense at
> > any point in the future without having to contact and document consent
> > from all contributors.
> 
> Yeah, right: they want to do what they like, without asking whether the
> contributors are fine with their decisions...
> Personally, I consider this FSF copyright assignment policy a very bad
> practice!
> 
> But I am digressing...

Sorry this email fell through the cracks, even if it is a digression.
I agree that FSF copyright assignment is at odds with the ethos of
empowering the people, because it transfers the people's power to the
organisation--trusting in its beneficence.  Oh, and that it's
identical to the people -> communist party power structure (the people
lose power), or the feudal copyright assignment of employee work to
their employers.

That said, it does make project management easier for the legal and
paperwork side--and for keeping things consistent, particularly if
records are ever lost...which counts as a pro, from a top-down
perspective ;-)

I haven't reread the history of this bug, but if I remember correctly
it's a win for GPL if the GPL translations are combined with BSD
sources, because the resulting binaries become inherently GPL,
assuming the translation meet the criteria for copyrightable material
(eg: originality).  I understand how to this could be frustrating for
a project manager, which is why I thought it was important to mention
the alternative.

Cheers,
Nicholas
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-multimedia-maintainers/attachments/20181022/b7a87033/attachment.sig>