On Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 10:52:38PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> > > > gnuplot 100612 grave
> > > > Maintainer: Thimo Neubauer
> > > > Licence problems. We can't do anything until a new upstream release
> > > > is available, as far as I can tell.
> > >
> > > Is there a problem with releasing with a non-pristine tarball?
> > > Deleting the offending files and creating a new .tgz seems to
> > > be a better solution than waiting for a new release which might
> > > not happen soon. I rewrote the problematic source file and sent
> > > it to the bug in November.
> >
> > More specifically, what is the license problem with gnuplot? It's
> > one-time author (John Gilmore) is a pretty durn staunch free software
> > guy...
>
> Well it has many example files that lacks permission to sell. See the
> bug report. Worse though, it turned out one of its source files had the
> same problimatic license. Upstream appears to be cooperating (sorta),
> but there are delays getting a release from them and they seem to have a
> weird policy of not licencing beta code freely or something.
Here is the complete report: as the gnuplot license only allows
patches but no branched tarballs, I'm not allowed to create a source
not including the "non-commercial purposes"-things. I wrote several
mails trying to convince upstream to release a new version with just
the few functions and examples stripped out, but they do not want to,
because they want to prepare a gnuplot 4.0 release. I also did create
a 3.7.1.1-release for them and sent it to Lars Hecking so that he
could just release it officially, but he told me that this would be
too much work :(
Don't think that upstream does not cooperate at all! The
non-free-examples were removed without any discussion, the missing
parts (implementations of the incomplete beta and gamma functions) are
in a state of rewrite right now, this time with better licenses.
> David, is your replacement really a good enough replacement? It's odd
> that Thimo hasn't commented it at all in the bug report.
Well, I did of course read the patches but as I knew that this would
not help the situation I simply forgot to comment... Sorry for this...
Until yesterday I though that I could create a fully-free release for
woody because Lars told me that I could create a
gnuplot-spinoff-tarball if I stated it clearly in the banner and
README but then he sent a mail that he reread the licenses and that it
is not possible :(
As the situation is, we either have to wait with woody until gnuplot
4.0 is released (which IMHO might take far too long) or kick gnuplot
out of woodys main... *sniff* Could it be possible to reintroduce
gnuplot 4.0 into main in a subrelease of woody?
CU
Thimo
--
Thimo Neubauer <thimo@debian.org>
Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 frozen! See http://www.debian.org/ for details
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