Re: [gentoo-dev] gentoo's policy on sender id

[Nicholas Jones <carpaski@gentoo.org>]

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Read this one:
http://www.apache.org/foundation/docs/sender-id-position.html

> One of the things that I like about gentoo is the lack of
> deep politics.

There are reasons you don't see deep politics. Most of us don't
like them, hence they are avoided. This is probably part of it.

> If someone is willing to maintain ebuild for packages that
> support sender id then why shouldn't gentoo host them? We
> already have stuff like vmware that is both patented and
> proprietary binary-only software.

Because we then have to deal with non-compliant interaction
with the liceneses. There is a great deal of bad-mojo here
if you read the full Apache position.

Recall that every distro has dropped XFree because of the
'logo adjacency' issue? Violation of the GPL... Well, that
is merely _one_ problem with Sender-ID.

We would not have the infrastructure to manage compliance
with such an annoying licence. I am not certain on this
point here, but it's entirely possible that arbitrary linking
of applications with sender-id may be inducing a violation
of the agreement. It's possible that we would be liable.

There are also points regarding termination of the licence
and the inability to transfer it. So there is no guarentee
that software using sender-id could be passed on to another
developer/team. Suddenly finding yourself in violation of
a license is probably not a good idea if your income is
zero, especially facing a prosecution with several billion
in the bank.

Someone get a law degree from somewhere and argue with me,
please.

--NJ



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