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

[Francesco Poli]

On Sun, 09 Feb 2014 20:14:45 +0400 Boris Pek wrote:

> Hi folks,
> 
> There are few very good news related to licensing of libraries used by Elmer:
[...]
> 3) tetgen library was relicensed under AGPLv3 since version 1.5.0 [...] 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.

Hello Boris,
I am happy to see that you are following the licensing developments
closely.


I would like to point out that the GNU AfferoGPL v3 is a controversial
license: although it is considered acceptable [1] for Debian main by
Debian ftp-masters, it is considered non-free by a number of people
(including me [2]...).

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/495721#17
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/495721#28

Just to be crystal clear: I am *not* a member of the Debian Project, I am
just an external contributor who's very interested (among other things)
in licensing issues.


Since I think the GNU AfferoGPL v3 is non-free, I would like to kindly
ask you to only enable tetgen in elmer as an optional feature.

I mean: I would be extremely pleased, if the elmer Debian package did
not contain parts under the GNU AfferoGPL v3 and had no strong
dependency on tetgen.
In other words, I hope that there will be the possibility to install
and use the elmer Debian package *without* installing the tetgen Debian
package and *without* unpacking AfferoGPL-licensed files onto the
system.

I hope this is feasible.
Thanks for considering.


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