[draft] debian_support.py relicensing under GPL2+ with OpenSSL exception

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

Heya, given I haven't yet heard back from them, I've prepared a draft
email to contact:

  Adeodato Simó
  Colin Watson
  Florian Weimer
  James Westby

asking for the permission to relicense their contributions to
debian_support.py under GPLv2+ with OpenSSL exception.

You can find the draft below. Unless there are objections, I plan to
send the email during the week-end; feedback on the text is welcome.

Cheers.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Heya,
  I'm contacting you as you have contributed in the past to the
debian_support.py Python module, shipped as part of the python-debian
Debian package, to ask for your agreement to change its license.

It has been brought to our attention [1] that debian_support.py use the
hashlib module from the Python standard library, de facto pulling in
code licensed under the OpenSSL license. As debian_support.py itself is
licensed under GPLv2 or above, and given that Debian considers the GPL
and OpenSSL licenses to be incompatible, this poses a serious problem
for the python-debian package.

We have currently worked around the problem but, to stay on the safe
side and to have a cleaner solution, we would like to relicense
debian_support.py under the popular terms of "GNU General Public License
version 2 (or above) with OpenSSL exception [2]" --- in machine-readable
debian/copyright [3] that would be "GPL-2+ with OpenSSL exception".

Do you agree with such a relicensing of your past contributions to
debian_support.py? (In case you want to inspect them, you can do so by
running "debcheckout python-debian ; cd python-debian ; git log --follow
lib/debian/debian_support.py").

If you do agree, can you please follow-up to this mail stating that you
do, and ideally taking care of: (a) GPG-signing your email; (b) keeping
pkg-python-debian-maint at lists.alioth.debian.org in the loop; and
(c) quoting the relevant parts of this email?

With many thanks for your cooperation and for your contributions to
python-debian!

For the python-debian maintainers,
Stefano Zacchiroli,


[1]: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=747031

[2]: In addition, as a special exception, the copyright holders give
     permission to link the code of portions of this program with the
     OpenSSL library under certain conditions as described in each
     individual source file, and distribute linked combinations including
     the two.
 
     You must obey the GNU General Public License in all respects for all
     of the code used other than OpenSSL. If you modify file(s) with this
     exception, you may extend this exception to your version of the
     file(s), but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to
     do so, delete this exception statement from your version. If you
     delete this exception statement from all source files in the
     program, then also delete it here.

[3]: https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/#license-specification

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  zack at upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader  . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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