swf files in Ubuntu

[Martin Pitt]

Hello Charlie,

Charlie Smotherman [2011-01-04  2:26 -0600]:
> I am curious as to whats Ubuntu's policy on having *.swf files in the archive?

We (as in the archive admins) mostly stick to the Debian position and
DFSG, with some exceptions like we consider GFDL as "free".

>From a legal POV it's primarily a license question. Many "strict free"
licenses like the GPL mandate that you distribute the "preferred form
of modification" (aka. "source") for all files, which *.swf is not.
For the same reason we reject GPL packages which ship PDFs without a
source (like ODF or LaTeX).

So if a package wants to ship an swf, it needs a "weaker" license like
BSD or MIT. If it's GPL, it's not distributable at all.

However, I expect that we still would put a package with just an swf
into multiverse, as it still violates the "source available" clause of
the DFSG.

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)