[Pkg-octave-devel] Bug#435214: octave-sp: license is neither GPL-compatible nor DFSG-free

[Steven G. Johnson]

Package: octave-sp
Version: 1:2003-4
Severity: serious
Justification: Policy 2.2.1

The copyright file lists the following:

    COPYRIGHT 1994 LIEVEN VANDENBERGHE AND STEPHEN BOYD
    Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for 
    any purpose without fee is hereby granted, provided that this entire 
    notice is included in all copies of any software which is or includes
    a copy or modification of this software and in all copies of the 
    supporting documentation for such software.

Notice that it only grants permission to use/copy/modify "without fee".  
Thus, this software cannot be distributed commercially and hence 
violates the DFSG.  (Probably the authors intended "without fee" to 
apply to the permission, not as a condition on distribution etc., but 
unfortunately that does not follow unambiguously from a literal 
reading.)

However, I happen to know Stephen Boyd personally (he is a Stanford 
professor), and he is a big free-software and GNU/Linux proponent who 
would doubtless be happy to clarify the license terms (or just switch to 
the standard MIT/X11 license language) if contacted.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.16.33-vpsX (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages octave-sp depends on:
ii  atlas3-base [liblapack. 3.6.0-20.6       Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra
ii  fftw3                   3.1.2-2          library for computing Fast Fourier
ii  libc6                   2.6-2            GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libgcc1                 1:4.2-20070712-1 GCC support library
ii  libgfortran1            4.1.2-13         Runtime library for GNU Fortran ap
ii  libhdf5-serial-1.6.5-0  1.6.5-5+b1       Hierarchical Data Format 5 (HDF5) 
ii  libncurses5             5.6+20070716-1   Shared libraries for terminal hand
ii  libreadline5            5.2-3            GNU readline and history libraries
ii  libstdc++6              4.2-20070712-1   The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  octave2.1               1:2.1.73-13      GNU Octave language for numerical 
ii  zlib1g                  1:1.2.3.3.dfsg-5 compression library - runtime

octave-sp recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information