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On Sunday 05 September 2004 22:33, Nicholas Jones wrote: |
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> Recall that every distro has dropped XFree because of the |
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> 'logo adjacency' issue? Violation of the GPL... Well, that |
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> is merely _one_ problem with Sender-ID. |
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> |
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> We would not have the infrastructure to manage compliance |
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> with such an annoying licence. I am not certain on this |
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> point here, but it's entirely possible that arbitrary linking |
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> of applications with sender-id may be inducing a violation |
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> of the agreement. It's possible that we would be liable. |
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> |
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> There are also points regarding termination of the licence |
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> and the inability to transfer it. So there is no guarentee |
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> that software using sender-id could be passed on to another |
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> developer/team. Suddenly finding yourself in violation of |
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> a license is probably not a good idea if your income is |
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> zero, especially facing a prosecution with several billion |
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> in the bank. |
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|
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From the gentoo point of view all of these problems are restrictions on |
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redistribution. At worst, RESTRICT="nomirror" solves them. Lets at least have |
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a consistent policy - we already have software (particularly games) that we |
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aren't allowed to redistribute. Sender-id software is no different. Having |
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said that, I doubt that this patent actually prohibits 3rd party mirrors like |
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cnet. |
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|
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Theres no doubt that this is a bad patent/license from a software developer |
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point of view, but gentoo is not in the business of developing mail server |
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software. The decision of whether to support sender-id should be left in the |
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hands of people who are (or are we going to start patching postfix to remove |
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code?). |
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|
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It's a slippery slope to reject ebuilds because we don't agree with the |
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licenses imposed on the developers of those packages, or because we believe |
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that they violate software patents. Where do you draw the line? There is no |
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doubt that the linux kernel violates some (bad) patents. Should it |
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potentially be removed? How about quake3 - I'm not allowed to rebrand and |
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redistribute it without paying a lot of money for a license. Should it also |
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be excluded from gentoo? |
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|
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> Someone get a law degree from somewhere and argue with me, |
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> please. |
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|
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You can email Microsofts licensing people and they will forward any questions |
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they can't answer to their lawyers. It might be useful to do this anyway, for |
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future protection. |
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|
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-- |
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