[Debian-med-packaging] Please consider relicensing of old version of hep.aida to enable free colt.jar

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Tony,

I have packaged the colt Java library for the Debian distributions
because there are at least two packages needing this library.  The colt
library contains a copy of the hep.aida.* code which has a license[1]
that is considered non-free according to the Debian Free Software
Guidelines (DFSG [2]) since it violates item 6.  We understand the
intention behind the restriction that was put in addition to LGPL but
there is some consensus that this type of licenses are doing more bad
than good in general.

Unfortunately there was no information how to contact the authors and
you seem to be the only one who remains connected to the successor of
hep.aida.* inside the FreeHEP project.  Could you do us a big favour and
either

  1. Relicense the old hep.aida.* code to pure LGPL (or whatever free
     license you might prefer) or

  2. give us a pointer to the author of hep.aida.* who might help us
     with our problem.

Kind regards and thanks for your work on Free Software

     Andreas.

[1] http://acs.lbl.gov/software/colt/license.html
[2] http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

-- 
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