Re: [wsjt-devel] Licensing Issue of SuperFox Mode

[Barry J. <zen...@ze...>]

On 24/07/2024 14:56, Hibby via wsjt-devel wrote:
> Hey Neil,
> 
> Don't worry - bubble not burst. I'm choosing to not pick a fight about 
> the specific licensing of the binaries. Arguments about licensing are 
> full of opinions and not very fun. They usually end up in flame wars and 
> cold disagreement, as I think we can see from the previous discussion. I 
> have expressed my opinions via other media as this is not the 
> appropriate stage and people are welcome to disagree via those media.
> 
> Putting licensing aside and coming back to more solid facts and 
> discussion of development - we can't include the binaries without the 
> source in Debian (and secondly, we can't include them in debian-nonfree 
> repo without explicit permission to redistribute them from Joe) - this 
> has been said by another Debian maintainer on the list already. It is 
> standard policy for Debian, part of our social contract and free 
> software guidelines [1] that drive the OS.
> 
> This means that everyone who chooses to 'apt install wsjtx' or use an in 
> built appstore from our package of rc5 onwards *doesn't* get superfox 
> signing and doesn't get the protection from pirates the feature is meant 
> to offer *unless* they are linux-capable enough to source the binaries 
> for their platform and put them in the correct folder themselves. We can 
> put in an interim solution of shipping something in the nonfree repo 
> which myon asked earlier but didn't get a response to.
> 
> This flows down to users of Ubuntu, Mint, Raspberry Pi OS and other 
> systems, which doesn't seem very fair. Also, as far as I'm aware the 
> binaries don't support all of the architectures that we do, so it limits 
> users from being able to play with weird and wonderful machines like risc-v!
> 
> 
> [1] https://www.debian.org/social_contract 
> <https://www.debian.org/social_contract>
> 
> Cheers,
> -- 
>    Hibby
>    Debian Developer
>    Packet Radioist
>    MM0RFN
> 

I agree with all the above.

This also applies to Mageia.

Barry
G4MKT
(WSJTX packager for Mageia Linux)