[Fwd: Licensing Policy for non-code?]

[Philippe Cloutier]

I'm not subscribed to the list and am replying "manually". Sorry if that 
breaks the thread.

Jason Harris wrote:

>Hello,
>
>From my experience as the developer with KStars, the people who package KDE
>for Debian do a very thorough vetting of the licensing of files, including
>non-code files.  We've had several discussions about the licensing of
>various data files in KStars.  So maybe the Debian guys have already done
>the work; for example, does this Firefox icon exist in the Debian KDE
>packages?
>
>regards,
>Jason
>
It exists in testing (Etch), but not in unstable (Sid). Actually, I 
opened a bug report about the issue as present in the version in 
testing, and the bug was since fixed in unstable. So, in this case the 
Debian guys didn't spot the issue. What's worst, is that I am about to 
open a second bug report of the same kind, against the same binary package.

All packages are license-checked on inclusion, but doing that is a 
significant job. For updates, maintainers would like to rely on upstream 
if there was nothing bad discovered in the initial check, to save work. 
AFAIK, the Debian Qt/KDE maintainers can rely on upstream KDE to not 
introduce problematic code. But unfortunately, it seems to be different 
for non-code.

If KDE had indeed no licensing policy for non-code, the natural thing to 
do for Debian would be to inspect non-code and prune problematic 
content. The question for someone doing that is "Is there another person 
that already did this work before me for another distro?" IOW, if KDE 
has a  "looser" policy than some distros, it could still be good to 
facilitate distributors work by documenting which content wouldn't fit 
stricter policies. Is this already done?

Thanks for the suggestion, despite the ironic outcome,
Filipus