Bug#698527: Elmer: few good news related to licensing.

[Peter Råback]

Hi Boris

No this was news to me. I appreciate that you brought this to our attention.

Now actually we have some plans to work a little bit with the packaging of Elmer. Part of the motivation is that our Windows installer has become gradually obsolete. We would also like to make the cross compilation easier. Therefore we thought about changing the build system from autotools to cmake. To my understanding this should make also the Linux packaging more straightforward. Actually Sami already submitted the first cmake scripts. 

As you've extensive experience in packaging for Debian would you have any guidance on how what to consider in the going to cmake, or whether you see this generally as a good idea for Debian packaging? Unfortunately most of our time goes to the development of Elmer so this work does not have the highest priority. However, I see this is important because for many users the compilation is a no-go. With some outdated installers out there also many of the bug reports are not relevant any more. Improved packaging would resolve many of these problems. 

Best regards,
Peter





----- Original Message -----
From: "Boris Pek" <tehnick at debian.org>
To: "Peter Råback" <peter.raback at csc.fi>, "Mika Malinen" <mika.malinen at csc.fi>, "Juha Ruokolainen" <juha.ruokolainen at csc.fi>, "Sampo Sillanpää" <sampo.sillanpaa at csc.fi>
Cc: 698527 at bugs.debian.org
Sent: Sunday, 9 February, 2014 6:14:45 PM
Subject: Elmer: few good news related to licensing.

Hi folks,

There are few very good news related to licensing of libraries used by Elmer:

1) OpenCASCADE libraries were relicensed under LGPL-2.1 [1] in the last stable
   release 6.7.0, so now they are compatible with GPL-licensed libraries linked
   to ElmerGUI (for example, with libav*).

2) Next OCE (OpenCASCADE Community Edition) release (0.15) will be based on
   OpenCASCADE 6.7.0 and will be relicensed under LGPL-2.1 as well [2]. Once
   packages with OCE will be updated to version 0.15, package with ElmerGUI
   will be reintroduced in Debian and Ubuntu.

3) tetgen library was relicensed under AGPLv3 since version 1.5.0 [3] and now
   is compatible with software under GPL-3+. If I understand correctly, you may
   just update tetgen-related files in your repo and use them without license
   issues. After that tetgen-plugin will be able to be enabled in Debian and
   Ubuntu packages.

[1] http://www.opencascade.org/getocc/license/
[2] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/oce-dev/zIKPCR4qQBg/cGjswxt6YEoJ
[3] http://wias-berlin.de/software/tetgen/1.5/FAQ-license.html

If you were aware of these news, I am sorry for the noise.

Best wishes,
Boris