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

[Tony Johnson]

Hi, the version of hep.aida packaged with colt is very old, and not 100% 
compatible with the current version. I would personally like to see 
hep.aida removed from colt, when we use colt we need to make our own 
distribution which removes the obsolete version of hep.aida. I am not 
sure where the licenses included with colt came from. The current 
version of hep.aida is here:

http://aida.freehep.org/

It is unambigously licensed under pure LGPL. hep.aida only specifies the 
interface, the java implementation can be found here:

http://java.freehep.org/jaida/

again licensed under pure LGPL. Please let me know if I can help further.

Tony

On 11/08/2013 02:51 AM, Andreas Tille wrote:
> 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
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-med-packaging/attachments/20131108/58bf83de/attachment.html>