Bug#496346: openarena: contains lcc, which is not free software

[Francesco Poli]

On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:42:58 +0100 MJ Ray wrote:

[...]
> lcc was mentioned on debian-legal back in August 2003 as an example of
> a non-free compiler in a book.  See
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/08/msg00552.html
> 
> Unless there's some other licence issued since, it seems pretty
> clearly unsuitable for debian main.

LCC has already been discussed on debian-legal [1][2] because it
was included in tremulous.
The conclusion was indeed that LCC is non-free.

Nonetheless, I see that tremulous is in contrib (not in main, at
least because of its data package being in non-free) and it seems
that LCC has been dropped.
Its changelog [3] states:

| The tools used to build the qvm files are still non-free but don't
| need to be included in Debian

QVM stands for Quake Virtual Machine, a bytecode interpreter,
whose instruction set is "derived from the bytecode interpreter
target of LCC, with minor differences" [4].
Hence, I think "qvm files" means the bytecode to be interpreted by
the QVM...
At the end of the day: IIUC, this means that a package in contrib
(tremulous) ships DFSG-free pre-compiled bytecode ("qvm files") that
requires an unpackaged compiler (LCC) to be built.
Which is OK, isn't it?

Maybe openarena could be moved to contrib while dropping
LCC in a similar way?

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/04/msg00229.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/05/msg00015.html
[3] http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/contrib/t/tremulous/current/changelog
[4] http://icculus.org/~phaethon/q3mc/q3vm_specs.html


Usual (or useless?) disclaimers: IANAL, TINLA, IANADD, TINASOTODP.

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..................................................... Francesco Poli .
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