Dear Olin, I am contacting you as a participant in the Debian GNU/Linux project. As you may or may not be aware, Debian GNU/Linux takes its mission of providing a free operating system very seriously, as defined by the Debian Free Software Guidelines. [0] These guidelines maintain the freeness of Debian, but sometimes at the cost of requiring some tedious clarification of licenses.
I am sending you this email in order to attempt to clarify the license on some code in the Scheme interpreter scheme48 that you hold copyright over. If you don't want to know the gory details, the gist of the matter is simple: we are curious if you would permit Debian to distribute the files you have copyright over in scheme48 under the terms of the scheme48 license, which is basically 3-clause BSD.[1] The details if you want them: The file in question is emacs/cmulisp.el in the upstream tarball. It currently has the following license declaration: ./emacs/cmulisp.el:;;; Copyright Olin Shivers (1988). ./emacs/cmulisp.el-;;; Please imagine a long, tedious, legalistic 5-page gnu-style copyright ./emacs/cmulisp.el-;;; notice appearing here to the effect that you may use this code any ./emacs/cmulisp.el-;;; way you like, as long as you don't charge money for it, remove this ./emacs/cmulisp.el-;;; notice, or hold me liable for its results. Unfortunately, the clause "as long as you don't charge money for it" is in conflict with Part 1 of the DFSG, "The license of a Debian component may not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources." You also hold the copyright to 14 other files in the tarball: d...@kronos:~/Work/bugs/scheme48-1.8.orig$ egrep -ri "copyright.*Olin Shivers|Olin Shivers.*copyright" . ./scheme/sort/delndups.scm:;;; Copyright (c) 1998 by Olin Shivers. ./scheme/sort/delndups.scm:;;; Copyright (c) 1998 by Olin Shivers. ./scheme/sort/vhsort.scm:;;; Copyright (c) 2002 by Olin Shivers. ./scheme/sort/lmsort.scm:;;; Copyright (c) 1998 by Olin Shivers. ./scheme/sort/lmsort.scm:;;; Copyright (c) 1998 by Olin Shivers. ./scheme/sort/visort.scm:;;; Copyright (c) 1998 by Olin Shivers. ./scheme/sort/visort.scm:;;; Copyright (c) 1998 by Olin Shivers. ./scheme/sort/vbinsearch.scm:;;; Copyright (c) 1998 by Olin Shivers. ./scheme/sort/vmsort.scm:;;; Copyright (c) 1998 by Olin Shivers. ./scheme/sort/vmsort.scm:;;; Copyright (c) 1998 by Olin Shivers. ./scheme/sort/sort.scm:;;; Copyright (c) 1998 by Olin Shivers. ./scheme/srfi/srfi-14.scm:; Copyright (c) 1994-2003 by Olin Shivers ./scheme/srfi/srfi-1.scm:;;; Copyright (c) 1998, 1999 by Olin Shivers. You may do as you please with ./scheme/srfi/srfi-13.scm:;;; Copyright (c) 1998, 1999, 2000 Olin Shivers. All rights reserved. ./emacs/cmulisp.el:;;; Copyright Olin Shivers (1988). All of these other files are licensed under the previous license, without the "as long as you don't charge money for it" clause. We are able to distribute software under such a license, although it is preferred to be kept under a license like MIT, the GPL, or BSD. I was wondering if you would be willing to let Debian distribute your code contributions under the slightly modified 3-clause BSD license that accompanies the rest of scheme48. Hopefully we can reach a compromise on this matter if we cannot distribute under the BSD license (GPL v2+ is another obvious option). If you are willing to let us distribute under the license of scheme48, then email confirmation through the bug report should be sufficient. I have CC'd the bug report in this email, and I would appreciate it if you continue to CC it in any responses. Thank you for your work on Scheme, Daniel Moerner [0] http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines [1] http://www.debian.org/misc/bsd.license -- Daniel Moerner <dmoer...@gmail.com> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
