Re: Packaging Open Sankoré for Debian

[Miriam Ruiz]

For the record, I've finally sent then the following message, through
the "feedback" form on their web page:


Hi,

My name is Miriam Ruiz, and I'm an a Debian [1] Developer. We're
interested in maintaining a package of the Open-Sankoré [2] in our
official repositories. We already have working packages [3], but we
seem to have a problem that is preventing us from being able to do it.

Although the file Sankore-Licence.txt explicitly says that "you can
redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Lesser GNU
General Public License", the headers of many of the files say "under
the terms of the GNU General Public License", so it's quite confusing
to know which of the licenses should apply. If it 's the case that those
files are licensed under the LGPL license, I suggest fixing their headers.

On the other hand, if parts of the program are distributed under the GPL,
you might want to know that there are some incompatibilities between the
GPL and the SSL licenses [4]. Those imply that we cannot deliver any
GPL'ed program linked against OpenSSL unless its license includes an
exemption to the GPL clauses that explicitly allows us to do so.

An example of such an exception might be something like [5]:

"""
   In addition, as a special exception, <the authors of the program>
   give permission to link the code of its release of <the program> with the
   OpenSSL project's "OpenSSL" library (or with modified versions of it
   that use the same license as the "OpenSSL" library), and distribute
   the linked executables.  You must obey the GNU General Public License
   in all respects for all of the code used other than "OpenSSL".  If you
   modify this file, you may extend this exception to your version of the
   file, but you are not obligated to do so.  If you do not wish to do
   so, delete this exception statement from your version.
"""

Could you possibly confirm whether the whole program is licensed under the
LGPL or, if that's not the case, do you think that it would be possible to
modify Open Sankoré's license to add a similar statement?

Greetings, and lots of thanks in advance,
Miry

[1] http://www.debian.org/
[2] http://dev.open-sankore.org/
[3] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debian-edu/sankore.git;a=summary
[4] http://people.gnome.org/~markmc/openssl-and-the-gpl.html
[5] http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/x/x11vnc/x11vnc_0.9.13-1/x11vnc.copyright