[Bese-devel] Re: rfc2109: upstream alive?

[Luca Capello]

Hello,

sorry for the (very) late reply, I was a bit busy with real life...

On Fri, 21 Jul 2006 02:56:16 +0200, Alan Shields wrote:
> Luca, my apologies. I'm under the weather something fierce. That and
> I receive over 50 spam emails an hour - I found your old mails and
> will go through them this weekend. Along with the other patches I've
> received.

No problem at all, usually I tried to get in contact with upstream
authors of the packages I maintain in Debian, because I think a strict
collaboration (or, at least, discussion) is necessary.

> On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 01:20:16AM +0200, Luca Capello wrote:
>> Moreover, as rfc2109.lisp contains RFC documents, I removed them
>> from the Debian package [4] (they are against the DFSG [5]) and
>> I'll propose the same for upstream (but this is a
>> _very_personal_opinion_).
>
> Stripping these is fine, though they're there to be the best form of
> documentation (in my opinion).
>
> Which clause of the DFSG do they violate? Any pointers from Debian
> Legal?  I admit confusion.

I never asked on Debian Legal, but a similar discussion is at [1].

The problem is about the license and redistribution, as stated in [2].
Specifically, in your case and IMHO [3], the problem with rfc2109 is
that the RFCs are included verbatim, but interleaved in the source
code (thus, "modified" and so against DFSG #3 [4]).  Moreover, as
there's no license attached to every single RFC, an end-user could
think that the whole source code (i.e, the lisp code and the
interleaved RFCs) are under the BSD license, which is absolutely
wrong.

I agree that in term of documentation the interleaved format is the
best, but maybe you can just include something as my patch [5] plus
a doc/ folder where the RFCs land (similar to rfc2388 [6]).

HTH :-)

Thx, bye,
Gismo / Luca

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/03/msg00002.html
[2] http://josefsson.org/bcp78broken/
[3] disclaimer: I never studied law and it's not my best interest
[4] http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

    3. Derived Works
   
    The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must
    allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license
    of the original software.

[5] http://cl-debian.alioth.debian.org/repository/lcapello/rfc2109-upstream/_darcs/patches/20060720210407-f6b0c-b84ff59374546e09173fadd6ec1b249db30b6fd2.gz
[6] http://common-lisp.net/project/rfc2388/
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