Re: portaudio license

[Dave Cunningham <spark@xdev.net>]

On Sat, Nov 13, 2004 at 03:12:12PM -0500, Glenn Maynard wrote:
>On Sat, Nov 13, 2004 at 06:19:50PM +0000, Henning Makholm wrote:
>> Since both of the words "request" and "condition" appear to apply to
>> the clause, it is ambigously phrase and Debian would take the
>> conservative position that the license is not free.
>> 
>> The situation changes if you can get the author to issue a license
>> clarification that makes it unambigous that the license is intended
>> to *legally* allow distribution of modifications that have not been
>> passed back to the author. (The author will still be at liberty to
>> think bad of modifiers who do not pass patches upwards).
>
>This license came up a couple months ago, with the same response: "get
>a clarification" (http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/09/msg00114.html).
>It never happened, apparently.  PortAudio is still in main with this
>license, packaged with Audacity.

Ok fair enough, the portaudio people want the license to be
compatible, but they do not know what has to be done.  So, in
layman's terms, what steps have to be taken to resolve this?

Is it sufficient to have such clarity in an email from the
founder of the project?  Does it require rewriting the license,
does rewriting the license require formally re-releasing the
software? (It would certainly require changing the source code
since the license is reproduced in comments at the top of each
source file.)

>From my limited correspondance, and from the fact that their
license is apparently flawed, I personally believe they are not
experienced with licenses and legal issues, so it would probably
be a good idea to explain very clearly that which they would
*have* to do before this software can be packaged, perhaps
suggesting alternative wording?

What happened with the issue of audacity including non-free code
anyway?

Thanks.