Bug#792670: androidsdk-ddms: android sdk license appears to violate debian charter

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl at lkcl.net
Fri Jul 17 12:20:54 UTC 2015


On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 1:11 PM, Emmanuel Bourg <ebourg at apache.org> wrote:
> Le 17/07/2015 12:06, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton a écrit :
>
>> thoughts?
>
> The code from android.googlesource.com clearly comes with an Apache-2.0
> license though. I wonder if these terms and conditions only apply to the
> SDK distributed by Google on developer.android.com. That would be
> somewhat similar to Oracle distributing Java with different terms than
> OpenJDK.

 the discussion is ongoing on a gnu list, and there it was raised that
the T&C are a generic overview that is required to be agreed with *in
addition* to the licenses, some of which, it was pointed out, are GPL
as well as apache2.

 there was an announcement only a few days ago where the FSF pointed
out that canonical's T&Cs clearly contradict the GPL...

 .... so this is not something that can be taken lightly.

 (case 1) - the T&Cs are over-and-above (i.e. in addition to) the
apache2 license, making the entire software non-free.  this would be
acceptable if and only if the android sdk code was moved to the
"nonfree" section.

 (case 2) the T&Cs *contradict* the GPL (if the person who assessed
the software on the gnu list is correct in that there is some GPL
software), thus placing debian in the rather awkward position of
violating its charter and quite possibly copyright law as well.

 this is why i raised this as "important" as it really really needs a
full and thorough review.  this _should_ be quite straightforward as
the rules on checking that the software is properly compliant
(copyright file) are very clear.  however if you'd like to do a more
thorough audit i have a program called copyright_check.py which does a
heck of a lot more than lintian.  it's an O(N^3) algorithm that
carries out a two-way verification of the copyright file's regexps
with the *actual* copright notices.

it would at least help you to verify that the copyright file correctly
matches (with nothing missing for example) the actual files.

 ... apologies for the extra work!

l.



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