[Pkg-octave-devel] Bug#435214: octave-sp: license is neither GPL-compatible nor DFSG-free
Steven G. Johnson
stevenj at fftw.org
Mon Jul 30 04:09:26 UTC 2007
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
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