[TAG] [lgang] Debian & OPL

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ben Okopnik (ben at linuxgazette.net):

> (perhaps naively.) Joerg Jaspert's comments are, at the very least,
> poorly founded or based in ignorance ("Many people dislike them, so if
> you want to keep them in the current way - have a thick skin")....

My reading of Joerg word "them" is that it referred to the packages,
and _not_ to the magazine staff.

Some Debian maintainers might well have disliked the lg* packages on
grounds that they felt they simply didn't belong as packages of a Linux
distribution at all, whereas a better case could be made for other
non-software packages such as LDP-related ones being closer to essential
contents.

I'm guessing that Joerg was motivated mainly by a slightly^Wthoroughly 
lazy assessment of the licensing, i.e., that he didn't bother to read
OPL for himself, but rather relied on what "debian-legal has concluded".

Developers in general dislike even attempting to understand licences,
and therefore are delighted to be able to foist off the task on somebody
else.  It happens that some of the "somebody else" people in this case
are, in my view, loons -- but they'd have to be a lot worse before
developers would cease passing the buck to them, as doing so is quite
convenient.

> If licensing was the issue, it wouldn't have taken much to email me and
> find out what we would do. I'm at least somewhat annoyed that he didn't
> even have the courtesy to do that.

Yes, that thought had occurred to me -- and I note that he hasn't done
so even yet, even though he was CC'd some days ago.

I'm suspecting that he has no plans to speak, because having dumped the
packages made his life easier, and he has no reason to want to
re-complicate things.  

If you want to engage him, you could identify yourself as the
editor-in-chief, say we've been considering alternate licences, and ask
if there are any whose adoption would suffice to cause him to re-upload
lg* packages.  You could pose that question as concerning future issues,
and leave the messier matter of past issues for later.  (As I was
saying, the law is perfectly clear about your authority to reissue under
a changed licence that still preserves contributors' interests, but 
community opinion to the contrary is quite strong.)