Yaroslav Halchenko <deb...@onerussian.com> writes: > Thanks for following up, Dave! I haven't realized that you are > maintaining your own fork on github with adjusted debian packaging
It's not very adjusted from what I submitted. > Before commenting on your points: Do you have intent to maintain > singularity within Debian? should we then join the forces? (I am DD so can > upload) No, I'm a Debian desktop user, but have to support RHEL-like systems and package for that (though there seem to be some fundamental problems using singularity on them and similar ones). >> The licence is actually BSD-3-Clause-LBNL in SPDX terms. I think its >> default licensing clause is a potential trap which Debian might >> consider. I've asked for an opinion from Fedora legal about including >> language to nullify that in a "separate written license agreement". > > well -- for completeness -- it is "without imposing a separate written license > agreement" Yes, which is why I added a notice to COPYING. > and overall paragraph in question is [...] > which I (IANAL) do not see a problem with. To me it reads as an additional > clause providing copyleft like license mandating making contributions > available > back publicly or directly to the lab under permissive terms. But indeed, > it makes the license not quite just a BSD-3 ;) It doesn't say the licence is to LBL. It's definitely not copyleft, as the purpose of copyleft is to prevent proprietary versions. (There's an explanation somewhere on gnu.org.) > just a note: problems with information on the website do not directly > relate to the problems with the source code/packaging, and there all the terms > are described, right? It might be a concern if either you worry about LBL's interpretation of the licence and copyright in general or if it made a package maintainer unable to contribute "upstream". > > oh, where on the website? can't find In the section on contributing. > I guess you are talking about rhc54 AKA Ralph Castain ? But he is not a > lawyer [1] and not a major contributor to singularity anyways (although > with sufficiently high privileges apparently on the upstream github repo). I know, but he appears to speak for the project and it seems consistent with what seems to be LBL policy (but not consistent with the Open MPI contributor agreement, for instance). > I am really not sure what kind of bad mood (or grappa) could make him say "You > cannot own" phrase... so I must say, I would just ignore that portion of the > discussion, and provide concrete pull request suggesting adjustment of the > wording and make that issue close with that: > https://github.com/gmkurtzer/singularity/pull/137/files > and by the time I have finished writing this email Gregory has already > merged it! ;) > > ut again -- that is not directly related to > packaging/redistribution in Debian or Fedora. I know what the licence says, I know what copyright law says, but I've been around long and widely enough to worry about that being ignored or mis-interpreted. I'm just pointing it out and urging caution. > oh -- thanks for the pointer. So, if I get it right, you aren't feeling > like contributing those patches to upstream yourself ATM? and you would > reconsider whenever a clarification is made on you retaining the > copyright to those patches? Yes. > or what exactly? (I usually do not really > care much enough to sweat for claiming my ownership on every line I have > ever changed.... git log keeps the record of the truth! ;) ) You may be OK putting changes in the public domain, but that's not generally possible, and there's a principle involved. > So, now we (I or you? or both?) should absorb the changes you have > accumulated in your clone and/or fedora packaging, within Debian > package: Changes I've made are distributed under a BSD3 or BSD2 licence, so you can take them if they're useful. I think you should worry about things that are at least potential security problems with a setuid program, but there's a lot that potentially needs fixing. After looking more closely I decided the package isn't currently in a good enough state for Fedora. I'd be happy for an expert to assure me that some of it isn't really a problem, of course.
