Hi! I am considering packaing for Debian the dutch aspell dictionary from http://savannah.gnu.org/download/aspell/dicts/. However, there seem to be some licensing problems. The package itself seems to lack a license at all. It seems to be based upon a Redhat package by the name of nl-aspell, which is licensed under the GPL. However, the Redhat package uses wordlists that are composed by the Dutch TeX User Groep and Piet Tutelaers. Those wordlists have the following copyright (see http://www.ntg.nl/spell-nl-v5b/, or the COPYRIGHT file included in the aspell-nl tarball): Copyright (C) 1996: Dutch word lists (woorden) and Dutch hyphenation patterns (patronen) Nederlandstalige TeX Gebruikersgroep, Postbus 394, 1740 AJ Schagen, The Netherlands. Copyright (C) 1993 - 1996: sorting, merging and hyphenation software (hyphtools) Piet Tutelaers. All provided material can be used freely. Copying is only allowed if the package is distributed complete and unchanged. We plan to update the package on a regular basis. Bug reports and bugfixes are welcomed. This license is clearly GPL-incompatible, which would mean that distributing the aspell-nl package, as well as the Redhat nl-aspell package, is illegal. Could someone please clarify the situation to me? Is a copyright on a word list even valid? What could we do to resolve this situation (I would really like to have Dutch aspell support in Debian)? -- Kind regards, +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | Bas Zoetekouw | Si l'on sait exactement ce | |--------------------------------| que l'on va faire, a quoi | | zoetekw@phys.uu.nl | bon le faire? | | bas@A-Es2.uu.nl | Pablo Picasso | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
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