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Re: is the license of gsview okay?



On Wed, Jan 31, 2001 at 01:05:09PM +0900, Atsuhito Kohda wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 31, 2001 at 10:18:45AM +0900, Atsuhito Kohda wrote:
> > > I am interested in gsview which is famous in Windows users
> > > and a kind of ghostview or gv.  But I am not sure if its license
> > > permits us to upload to Debian or not.
> > 
> > Why do you want to package it? It's not like it fills a need that 
> > can't be filled with free software. 
> 
> Well, it might be not so important but I guess that many
> users of Windows now come and begin to use Linux so if they
> find the same applications in Linux as in Windows they might
> feel happy.

I doubt there's that many Windows' users who have a huge attachment
to their Postscript viewer. 
 
> > This is the only part that seems non-free. If I read this right, it's
> > a restriction on distribution Debian can't satisfy even in non-free; we
> > would have to make sure anyone we distributed to agreed before we gave
> > them a copy.
> 
> Then, at installation with preinst, one can ask a user
> if you agree all terms and conditions of pstotext's license?
> and if a user selects 'Yes' then install gsview otherwise
> aborts to install.  But this seems to be insufficient...

Please don't - whether or not it's sufficient (which is true - we
already distributed it by the time they see that message), it's
obnoxious and something that should be avoided if possible.

Please don't package this if you don't use it. I doubt there is many
(any, hopefully) Debian developers who want to see non-free grow, and
especially not for a redundant Postscript view. We have gv, ghostview,
gnome-gv and the KDE one in Debian. We don't need a non-free Postscript
viewer.

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org



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