control: severity -1 normal Hi Göran,
thanks for your bug report. I think that the issue is less serious than it seems at first glance (see below). At the moment, I'm inclined to update debian/copyright (which must be done anyway), close the issue, and be done with this. The alternatives would be to move NMAP to non-free or drop it from Debian altogether. Or one could try to get into discussions with the fine folks at Insecure.Com LLC on how to properly write free(ish) software licenses. I have neither the time nor the energy to do the latter. > The latest nmap is under a new license that seems to go against > DFSG § 1 (Free Redistribution) seems to be intended to go against > DFSG § 6 (No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor), and it > could also be argued that it goes against DFSG § 9 (License Must > Not Contaminate Other Software). While I agree that the license is problematic, this is not entirely new. Even back in version 5 there was very similar bizarre language (in main.cc) about somebody's opinions on how the well-established term "derivative work" is supposed to include merely running a program and parsing its output. Every attempt at redefining what "derivative work" means is clumsy at best, especially while referring to the GPL; however, I don't see any problems with DFSG§1 or DFSG§6. The annotations are little more than the expression of the license author's opinion. Sentences that include "The idea here is…", "To avoid any misunderstandings…", or "we consider…" are not something that a licensee can reasonably be expected to agree to in order to accept a software license. Cheers, -Hilko
