reopen 350739 thanks On Mon, Apr 03, 2006 at 10:11:19PM +0200, Eduard Bloch wrote:
> I am sorry to say that I must close this bug report. For a simple reason: I > have been threatened by Joerg Schilling who claims that I would defame him > by distribution of untrue and unproveable statements WRT to his works and > kind of licensing them. Legal intimidation does not make this cease to be a bug. If anything, a copyright holder who would act in such an antisocial manner towards others in the Free Software community that are in good faith trying to avoid violating the intellectual property rights of any other copyright holders is an even stronger reason to avoid distributing such a work in Debian. > I do this under protest but beeing forced to do so. If you are being "forced" to make technically incorrect decisions about the status of release-critical bugs in the BTS, then I'm afraid I would have to say your access to the BTS should be restricted for the good of the project. However, I don't think it makes sense that you would feel compelled to close bug reports as a result of legal threats; I can understand that you might choose not to make any further statements about the subject, but for someone to sue you because of the existence of a bug report in the Debian BTS would be very... special. > And now I do even explicitely admit that his statements about the > separation of GPL ยง3 and the previous paragraphs have a solid basis and > are a possible valid interpretation of GPL in Germany. This is no protection for Debian. I am not in Germany, and German courts have no personal jurisdiction over me; and even in Germany, the fact that the advanced interpretation is a possible *valid* interpretation does not make this interpretation *binding* on Joerg Schilling, the German courts, or other copyright holders in cdrtools. (If German law has a principle of estoppel, that may prevent Joerg from suing us for doing things with cdrtools that he says his interpretation of the GPLv2 allows; but that still isn't binding on the other copyright holders.) Also, I don't buy the notion that German courts are so insane that they would believe the shell *scripts* in the conf/ directory aren't scripts, whether or not you accept Joerg's... "unique" definition of scripts that excludes the contents of the RULES/ directory. > However, I am faced with a legal threat if I don't do an additional thing: > closing this bug report. Joerg Schilling has been informed that closing this > bug report does not have any meaning and it will not magically disappear. > However, he insists on seeing this act. I'm sorry that you were unable to stand up to this ridiculous threat. The world is a little bit worse for all of us whenever someone is coerced into taking wrong action by someone with more lawyers than sense. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.org/
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