Hi!

I would like to get some advice with an important licensing issue with
libsnmp-base and libsmi2-common. Both of them are shipping MIB that are
quite essential and would make most of the utils relying on them unusable
without them. Both of them do NOT have any mention of those in
debian/copyight. At least, most of those MIB are non-free because
copyrighted by IETF and released under the same license as corresponding
RFC.

This would mean moving those MIB in a non-free package and SNMP/SMI related
tools in contrib. This would be quite a change for lenny, so I suppose that
we would ignore this issue for lenny. This would also mean that an
important daemon (snmpd) won't be supported by Debian (because in contrib).
This would also move a lot of packages in contrib (see reverse depends of
libsnmp15).

I did not file bug reports yet about those issues.

Any thought?


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On Fri, 2008-09-05 at 10:41 +0200, Vincent Bernat wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I would like to get some advice with an important licensing issue with
> libsnmp-base and libsmi2-common. Both of them are shipping MIB that are
> quite essential and would make most of the utils relying on them unusable
> without them. Both of them do NOT have any mention of those in
> debian/copyight. At least, most of those MIB are non-free because
> copyrighted by IETF and released under the same license as corresponding
> RFC.

If I understand correctly these MIBs are interface definitions, which
are generally considered not copyrightable. Any comments in them might
have to be removed though.

Ben.



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Le vendredi 05 septembre 2008 Ã* 11:08 +0100, Ben Hutchings a écrit :
> If I understand correctly these MIBs are interface definitions, which
> are generally considered not copyrightable. Any comments in them might
> have to be removed though.

Not only the comments, but also the descriptions of the objects, without
which the MIBs aren’t really useful for humans (but admittedly still are
for computers).

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OoO Pendant le temps de midi du vendredi 05 septembre 2008, vers 12:23,
Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> disaitÂ*:

>> If I understand correctly these MIBs are interface definitions, which
>> are generally considered not copyrightable. Any comments in them might
>> have to be removed though.

> Not only the comments, but also the descriptions of the objects, without
> which the MIBs aren’t really useful for humans (but admittedly still are
> for computers).

Therefore, a solution would be to rewrite those MIB with diffferent
descriptions?
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