Re: [Gnewsense-dev] status of freedom bugs

[Sam Geeraerts]

Robert Millan schreef:
> On Sat, Dec 05, 2009 at 12:28:03AM +1030, Karl Goetz wrote:
> > http://bugs.gnewsense.org/Bugs/00323 
> > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=559444
>
> I think they might have a point here.

I'd say we run it by licensing@ to get a third opinion, but they've been 
rather unresponsive lately. Maybe Debian folk do have a point. It could 
be that the "real" source code was just a one off thing that was deleted 
after this file was generated, which would make this (being the next 
best thing) the preferred source. It looks like linux-libre doesn't 
remove it. We could present this case to Alexandre and/or 
gnu-linux-libre to get some more opinions. We should work more closely 
with them on this kind of stuff anyway.

> > http://bugs.gnewsense.org/Bugs/00351 partly fixed upstream, forwarded 
> > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=559443
>
> Files without explicit copyright notice aren't necessarily unlicensed.  It
> is generally understood that the global license notice applies to them.
>
> It's good practice to put a license notice in each file though.

A question was once posed to rms about files without copyright in Linux 
[1]. The email is missing some context, but he seemed to suggest that no 
license notice = non-free. We should have taken the effort to clarify it 
at the time.

> > http://bugs.gnewsense.org/Bugs/00354 not sure if debian would consider this a 
> > bug.
>
> They wouldn't.  Actually I'm not even sure it's a bug myself.  The person
> running the non-free software that could connect to this isn't necessarily
> the same who runs the server.  In fact, they might not even know each other.

If there are no known free clients that can connect to it then I think 
it is indeed similar to ndiswrapper and thus a valid bug.

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-users/2008-12/msg00015.html