[Debian-med-packaging] License of Tcode and SSJ

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Richard,

I'm writing you on behalf of the Debian Med team.  We are trying to
inject any free software which is relevant in biology into main Debian.
It has turned out that SSJ is a precondition for one of our targets and
this in turn needs Tcode as precondition.  We have created a package of
it but the code was rejected by our ftpmaster since he considers the
license just beeing on some "random" web page not sufficient to accept
it valid for the actual code (see discussion below).

It would be really kind if you could do one of the following (according
to the time you want to spent into this):

   1. Create a new download archive that contains the text of the GPL
      license explicitly.

   2. Answer to this public mailing list that Tcode and SSJ are
      really licensed under GPL and the text on your license page
      applies to both source code archives.

Kind regards and thanks for your support

       Andreas.

----- Forwarded message from Thorsten Alteholz <alteholz at debian.org> -----

Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2014 14:25:40 +0200 (CEST)
From: Thorsten Alteholz <alteholz at debian.org>
To: Tim Booth <avarus at fastmail.fm>
cc: Andreas Tille <tille at debian.org>, Thorsten Alteholz <ftpmaster at ftp-master.debian.org>
Subject: Re: [ftpmaster at ftp-master.debian.org: Comments regarding tcode_0.1.20080917-1_amd64.changes]

Hi Tim,

On Mon, 14 Apr 2014, Tim Booth wrote:
> That text comes directly from this link:
> 
> http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~simardr/ssj/ssj-licence.html
> 
> Which is linked on the download page for SSJ/TCode:
> 
> http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~simardr/ssj/
> 
> I agree it would be clearer if they put the license in the tarball but
> I'm satisfied that the software is indeed free.  Is this evidence enough
> to keep ftpmaster happy?

not really, according to the GPL, the text has to be distributed with
the sources. So strictly speaking the software is not free at all.
Anyway, the text on the license page only provides information about
SSJ. So at least a statement from upstream about the license of tcode
is needed (and added as comment to debian/copyright).

  Thorsten



----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
http://fam-tille.de