[maemo-developers] Is mauku open source, i.e free or is in non-free?

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Tuesday 26 January 2010 19:30:25 Carsten Munk wrote:
> Maybe a worthwhile discussion for Council to get into as well, this
> particular license does say you are not allowed to redistribute the
> Mauku source code from maemo.org (or anywhere).

As a member of the Council I would say that we need to somewhere make it clear 
that by uploading a source package to maemo.org, you are giving maemo.org a 
licence to redistribute that source and the binaries built from it (and that 
you assert you have the right to give such a licence).  Shall we add that to 
http://wiki.maemo.org/Extras?

That would protect maemo.org but does nothing to stop non-free software going 
into free.

> My personal view would be seperating it at OSD definition as history
> shows us we might have to watch out for what software we distribute
> from maemo.org as it opens the community to C&D's.

As a member of the community, my view is that we should clearly adopt one of 
the standard definitions of open source.  I don't particularly care whether 
we adopt the OSD or some other definition.  For practical reasons (as we are 
based on Debian) I would suggest adopting "the Debian DFSG as defined by the 
Debian Social Contract and operated by the Debian project".  In practice that 
is identical to OSD I believe but it would mean we can rely on the 
debian-legal determinations when they exist (and, in particular, we can 
re-use anything from Debian's free section).  

Graham