Re: Non-free package licenses and replacements

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 01:37:22PM +0100, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> On Jan 24, Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> wrote:
> 
>  >[mrouted]
>  >If anyone actually cares, I may be able to get this relicensed and am
>  >willing to at least try.  I'm mildly surprised that anyone is still using
>  >this.
> Two weeks ago I opened #227146 but the maintainer did not reply:
> 
>   The OpenBSD people managed to have stanford relicense it:
>   http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.sbin/mrouted/LICENSE
> 
>   OTOH DVMRP is useless in the modern Internet, so the package could
>   just be removed from debian.
> 
> So I suggest again to kill the package.
> 
> Other non-free packages I know about:
> 
> rar: this is needed to unpack rar 3.x archives. There is no alternative.
> 
> unicorn: partially non-free ADSL modem driver. There is no alternative.

Actually, the only non-free part in this, is a soft-ADSL library there
is no free replacement anywhere. It has a clear interface though, since
it is called from the GPLed driver, and if someone with ADSL knowledge
and some time to devote is ready to reimplement it, the unicorn package
can go directly in main.

Or someone can convince Alcatel to release it under a free licence. I
tried this working trough Bewan, who does the driver, but even they
don't have access to the source of it, so i seriously doubt this will
happen.

Friendly,

Sven Luther