Re: [Notion-devel] Getting notion out of Debian/non-free

[Arnout E. <no...@bz...>]

On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 10:06 AM, <no...@di...> wrote:

> Can we talk about what keeps notion in non-free? Section 4 of the DFSG at
>
>  http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
>
> explicitly allows restrictions on the project name.
>

I would love that to happen.

The Debian bug that talks about this at
>
>  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=544848
>
> mentions that Tuomo had issues not only with the name of the project,
> but also with the name of the source and configuration files.


I seem to remember that I've brought this up on debian-legal more recently,
but can't find the thread right now. Will search more later.

Would we consider renaming all ion* to notion*? If that's the only hurdle,
> it sounds well worth it to me.
>

That would not do anything to side-step the hurdle as described by Ben in
that message: the problem is not that Notion would violate the license, but
that the license is too restrictive. Changes to Notion itself won't help,
because whatever we change doesn't make the license more or less
restrictive.

There is, however, also good news: as far as I can see, the things that are
considered 'too restrictive' are not in the license itself, but in
claims/interpretations/expressed 'intentions' by Tuomo. Basically those are
irrelevant: what's relevant is what's actually in the license, not what has
been said about it after the fact.

You could make the case that any proclaimed restrictions that go beyond
what's allowed by the DFSG aren't in fact in the license, but are
unreasonably broad interpretations of the license. I think that's a
reasonable position, and then Notion can be considered DFSG-free.

I've updated
https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/notion/index.php?title=Licensing_FAQ for
a little bit.


Kind regards,

Arnout