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

[Chris Bainbridge <chrb@gentoo.org>]

On Sunday 05 September 2004 22:33, Nicholas Jones wrote:
> 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.

From the gentoo point of view all of these problems are restrictions on 
redistribution. At worst, RESTRICT="nomirror" solves them. Lets at least have 
a consistent policy - we already have software (particularly games) that we 
aren't allowed to redistribute. Sender-id software is no different. Having 
said that, I doubt that this patent actually prohibits 3rd party mirrors like 
cnet.

Theres no doubt that this is a bad patent/license from a software developer 
point of view, but gentoo is not in the business of developing mail server 
software. The decision of whether to support sender-id should be left in the 
hands of people who are (or are we going to start patching postfix to remove 
code?).

It's a slippery slope to reject ebuilds because we don't agree with the 
licenses imposed on the developers of those packages, or because we believe 
that they violate software patents. Where do you draw the line? There is no 
doubt that the linux kernel violates some (bad) patents. Should it 
potentially be removed? How about quake3 - I'm not allowed to rebrand and 
redistribute it without paying a lot of money for a license. Should it also 
be excluded from gentoo?

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

You can email Microsofts licensing people and they will forward any questions 
they can't answer to their lawyers. It might be useful to do this anyway, for 
future protection.

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