[DebianGIS-dev] Bug#422537: cfitsio3: GPL/PD but includes GPL compress.c from gzip

[Aurelien Jarno]

Justin Pryzby a écrit :
> Package: libcfitsio2, libcfitsio3, slang-cfitsio, libgdal1-1.3.2
> # apt-cache rdepends output
> # kst-plugins is gpl
> # fv is written by the same guy as fitsio so..
> 
> It's unclear to me why/that/if it's allowed for cfitsio to include GPL
> compress.c from gzip, when it is not itself GPL.  In particular, it
> isn't clear why it's allowed for packages which depend on fitsio to be
> distributed under a license other than GPL (modulo exceptions from the
> zlib people).
> 

Well the License.txt file from upstream is actually clear:

Alternate versions of the compress.c and wcsutil.c files (called
compress_alternate.c and wcsutil_alternate.c) are provided for users
who want to use the CFITSIO library but are unwilling or unable to
publicly release their software under the terms of the GNU General
Public License.   These alternate versions contains non-functional
stubs for the file compression and uncompression routines and the
world coordinate transformation routines used by CFITSIO.  Replace the
file `compress.c' with `compress_alternate.c' and 'wcsutil.c' with
'wcsutil_alternate.c before compiling the CFITSIO library.  This will
produce a version of CFITSIO which does not support reading or writing
compressed FITS files, or doing image coordinate transformations, but
is otherwise identical to the standard version.

In short:
- CFITSIO with compressed file support -> GPL
- CFITSIO without compressed file support -> PD

As Debian is distributing the version with compressed file support, the
debian/copyright file should be update to GPL.

I will fix that in the next upload.

-- 
  .''`.  Aurelien Jarno	            | GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
 : :' :  Debian developer           | Electrical Engineer
 `. `'   aurel32 at debian.org         | aurelien at aurel32.net
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