Re: first questions on validator.nu

Hello Henri,

Thanks a lot for your thorough answers.

On Dec 7, 2007, at 20:42 , Henri Sivonen wrote:
> I considered it very briefly and figured that by downloading from  
> the original distribution sites I don't need to consider what legal  
> or maintenance obligations I'd have if I distributed the third-party  
> code myself. For example, I don't need to find out which packages  
> would require me to find complete corresponding source code and  
> distributing that, too.

That's a good point, and as I mentioned, I find the installation  
technique really fascinating. I am, however, trying to figure out how  
I ended up with a 440MB dependencies directory, if as you say it only  
downloads a fifth of that through the network. heavy unzipping?

ot@qa:/usr/local/validator.nu/checker$ du -sh dependencies/
441M	dependencies/


> Disclaimer: IANAL, TINLA.
>
> There is currently one data file that the software pulls in from the  
> network at runtime (yeah, that's in itself bad) that I think might  
> not be Open Source: the IANA language tag registry.

That's much less than I first imagined. Cool.

> I think accepting even one invariant section is a slippery slope and  
> a potential problem considering inclusion in software distributions  
> that don't like slippery slopes. I don't really know what I should  
> do about to IANA registry file. The ideal solution would be for the  
> IETF to relax their licensing terms. I think using copyright to  
> enforce the integrity of normative files is the wrong way to go. I  
> think the IETF (and the W3C for that matter) should release their  
> normative stuff Free as in Free Software and only require modified  
> versions to carry a notice that they are modified versions.

IANAL either, but indeed this is a familiar issue yet still rather  
fuzzy to me. I suppose this is part of the rationale behind the  
distribution of the sgml-lib separately from the markup validator. I  
am, however, sympathetic to the concern about changes to normative  
docs. Asking for a note about modification is OK for human-readable  
documents, but what about machine-readable schemas, for instance?

I'm hoping to discuss this with our legal expert next time I travel to  
Europe...

> Other than that, everything above the JDK should be Open Source as  
> defined by OSI and Free Software as defined by the FSF. I am also  
> pretty sure that all the *runtime* dependencies are also Free  
> Software as defined by Debian.

Fantastic. Thanks also for the detailed check. Good to know that the  
only possibly problematic libs are not needed for runtime.

[more on running as servlet and SVG/nvdl later]

Thank you!
-- 
olivier

Received on Friday, 28 December 2007 08:40:01 UTC