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Bug#424018: dvi2tty licence clarification needed!



Hello,

To summarise this thread we have the following statments from the
major contributors, which ought to have been enough.

On Fri, 03 Aug 2007, Marcel J.E. Mol wrote:
> As far as I'm concerned, hte license can be changed to fully GPL and 
> the non-commercial statement can be removed.

On Fri, 03 Aug 2007, Marcel J.E. Mol wrote:
> But, dvi2tty is in fact my creation.
> It is derived from the dvitty program written in Pascal by Svante.
> E.g. I am the author of the C version.
> So I think I'm entitled to release the code as GPL without further
> permission from Svante, but I'm not sure...

On Tue, 07 Aug 2007, Svante Lindahl wrote:
> As Marcel says, I wrote the original dvitty in Pascal (initially on
> TOPS-20, and then later ported to 4.3BSD Unix, and Pyramid OSx).
> I have no issues if the dvi2tty is GPL:ed at this time.

The manner in which Marcel J. E. Mol has kept historical data for
the program needs to be commended, but it is (IMHO) not enough for
DFSG-free-ness in 2007.

The problem is that the code was developed from 1988 to 2003 by
Marcel J. E. Mol under the original non-DFSG license. During this
period a number of patches were provided --- a priori under
the same (non-DFSG) license. The contributors are listed at the top
of dvi2tty.c.

Some of these patches may be irrelevant under gcc+glibc but the
remaining contributors need to be contacted and the issue sorted out.

Regards,

Kapil.
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