Bug#361846: [Pkg-openldap-devel] Bug#361846: non-free license for core.schema

[Quanah Gibson-Mount]

--On Tuesday, October 03, 2006 1:24 PM -0700 Russ Allbery <rra at debian.org> 
wrote:

> Quanah Gibson-Mount <quanah at stanford.edu> writes:
>> Steve Langasek <vorlon at debian.org> wrote:
>
>>> If this file is a non-copyrightable interface definition, the bug here
>>> is the presence of a copyright notice and license statement where there
>>> should be none.
>
>> ITS#4693 in the OpenLDAP ITS system.
>
> Q, if you need help supporting this upstream, note to them that a literal
> reading of the current license would say that you're not allowed to modify
> the schema on your local system unless you write a completely new schema
> from scratch without referring to that one.  Which is kind of silly.

Official thoughts on this here:

<http://www.openldap.org/its/index.cgi/Incoming?id=4693;selectid=4693>



Unofficial thoughts here (from Howard Chu):

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I fail to see how any of this is the OpenLDAP Project's concern. The 
Project provides a source code distribution, not runnable packages. Whoever 
creates the runnable packages deals with packaging issues however they see 
fit.

As a philosophical point - in the United States, every written work is 
automatically covered by copyright at the moment of creation. You'll note 
that practically every file in the OpenLDAP source tree is covered by one 
or more copyrights. To assert that things that are copywritten cannot be 
distributed freely is a rather peculiar viewpoint; things can be 
distributed according to the License granted by the copyright holder. Where 
upstream copyrights apply, the Project really doesn't have any choice in 
the matter.

Not an official Project position of course, just providing my personal 
perspective.

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--Quanah

--
Quanah Gibson-Mount
Principal Software Developer
ITS/Shared Application Services
Stanford University
GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html