[Debian-med-packaging] Looking for help to replace some non-free Java code pieces

Wed Nov 6 10:23:08 UTC 2013

Hi Andreas.

I don't think I'll be able to be much helpful, but let me try.

Il 05/11/2013 14:24, Andreas Tille ha scritto:
> Hi,
> 
> I investigated some time to fix the problem that one part of libcolt-java
> which has the following problem:
> 
> Files: src/hep.aida.*
> Copyright: © 2004 Pavel Binko, Dino Ferrero Merlino, Wolfgang Hoschek, Tony Johnson, Andreas Pfeiffer, and others.
> License: LGPL-no-military
>  hep.aida.* is non-free according to the information in xdocs/license.xml:
>  .
>   Permission to use and/or redistribute this work is granted under the terms of
>   the LGPL License, with the exception that any usage related to military
>   applications is expressly forbidden. The software and documentation made
>   available under the terms of this license are provided with no warranty.

How bad... I wonder whether the person who wrote this funny license
realized that they were going to strike more normal people like us than
military people, which probably would use that code without even
checking out the license if they needed.

(that said, I'm a quite anti-military guy, but that's hardly the way to go)

Ok, enough for the rant. Let's go on...

> We did not found a way to contact the authors and have not yet found a
> way to free the actual code shipped with the libcolt-jar source.
> However the license also says : "Check the FreeHEP home page for more
> info." and I noticed that several modules of the freehep project are
> maintained by Debian Java and Giovanni Mascellani (in CC) is frequently
> mentioned as uploader.  So I tried to ask you for help.
> 
> I noticed that the code with the questionable non-military license has
> the files:
> 
>  $ find src/hep/ -type f -name "*.java" | sort
> src/hep/aida/bin/AbstractBin1D.java
> src/hep/aida/bin/AbstractBin.java
> src/hep/aida/bin/BinBinFunction1D.java
> src/hep/aida/bin/BinFunction1D.java
> src/hep/aida/bin/BinFunctions1D.java
> src/hep/aida/bin/DynamicBin1D.java
> src/hep/aida/bin/MightyStaticBin1D.java
> src/hep/aida/bin/QuantileBin1D.java
> src/hep/aida/bin/StaticBin1D.java
> src/hep/aida/IAxis.java
> src/hep/aida/IHistogram1D.java
> src/hep/aida/IHistogram2D.java
> src/hep/aida/IHistogram3D.java
> src/hep/aida/IHistogram.java
> src/hep/aida/ref/AbstractHistogram1D.java
> src/hep/aida/ref/AbstractHistogram2D.java
> src/hep/aida/ref/AbstractHistogram3D.java
> src/hep/aida/ref/Converter.java
> src/hep/aida/ref/FixedAxis.java
> src/hep/aida/ref/Histogram1D.java
> src/hep/aida/ref/Histogram2D.java
> src/hep/aida/ref/Histogram3D.java
> src/hep/aida/ref/Histogram.java
> src/hep/aida/ref/Test2.java
> src/hep/aida/ref/Test.java
> src/hep/aida/ref/Util.java
> src/hep/aida/ref/VariableAxis.java
> 
> 
> 
> which has a few similar looking names in FreeHep at
> 
> http://java.freehep.org/svn/repos/freehep/list/freehep/tags/freehep-aidajni-3.2.6/src/main/java/?bypassEmpty=true
> 
> Please forgive my Java naivity but is there a slight chance to free
> libcolt-java (and thus enable depending packages moving from contrib to
> main) when looking from your freehep educated point of view. Any other
> hint is welcome as well (for instance you might have some contact to
> original hep authors or whatever).

We're opening quite a nest of snakes here, unfortunately. The
distribution of FreeHEP and related packages is very, very messy and
unmaintained. They have many different websites with different and
(probably) diverging versions of different and partially overlapping
collections of packages. Many of these websites are autogenerated using
"standard" Java tools, which are of course very good in quickly
generating a lot of pages that humans spend a lot of time to parse
and/or ignore.

In the specific case, I can't find the non-free pieces of code from
hep.aida.* elsewhere than in colt. At the same time, I'm not a "FreeHEP
educated point of view", because I just packaged FreeHEP as GeoGebra
dependency. Although it is stated that AIDA should be a generic
interface with many impementations and the link you point out should be
another implementation, this doesn't really seem to be the case: the
classes used by colt are

$ grep -hr aida . | sed -e 's|[][ ,();{}\t/<>]|\n|g' | grep aida | sort
| uniq
hep.aida
hep.aida.bin
hep.aida.bin.BinFunction1D
hep.aida.bin.BinFunction1D
hep.aida.bin.BinFunctions1D
hep.aida.bin.BinFunctions1D
hep.aida.bin.BinFunctions1D.functions
hep.aida.bin.BinFunctions1D.geometricMean
hep.aida.bin.BinFunctions1D.max
hep.aida.bin.BinFunctions1D.median
hep.aida.bin.BinFunctions1D.sum
hep.aida.bin.BinFunctions1D.sumLog
hep.aida.bin.BinFunctions1D.sumOfLogarithms
hep.aida.bin.DynamicBin1D
hep.aida.bin.QuantileBin1D
hep.aida.IAxis
hep.aida.IHistogram1D
hep.aida.IHistogram2D
hep.aida.IHistogram3D
hep.aida.ref
hep.aida.ref.Converter.toString
hep.aida.ref.Histogram2D
hep.aida.ref.Histogram3D
hep.aida.ref.VariableAxis

Some of them (like for example BinFunctions1D) don't appear in any copy
of AIDA I could find, except of course for those packaged with COLT. I'm
mostly checking [1]. [2] may have other resources, but I couldn't find much.

 [1] svn://svn.freehep.org/svn/freehep/trunk/jaida
 [2] http://aida.freehep.org/tools.thtml

I was briefly in contact with FreeHEP authors some years ago. They
didn't have much time to answer me at the time and I doubt anything
changed (if not in worse), but you can give a try. I was in touch with
Marc Donszelmann and Tony Johnson, the first two listed in [3].

 [3] http://java.freehep.org/team-list.html

I wish you good luck, because I think you'll need much... :-) Feel free
to ask me again, although I don't think I'll be able to contribute much
more.

Giovanni.
-- 
Giovanni Mascellani <mascellani at poisson.phc.unipi.it>
Pisa, Italy

Web: http://poisson.phc.unipi.it/~mascellani
Jabber: g.mascellani at jabber.org / giovanni at elabor.homelinux.org

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