Re: Hello

[Helen Faulkner <helen@debian.org>]

Thomas Weber wrote:
> Hello, 
> 
>>I will take the opportunity here to ask you a question: I always
>>wondered why ROOT is not in the debian archives, altought it provides
>>a direct way to build deb packages from the sources?
> 
> While not being a DD, I guess it's a license problem:
> 
> http://root.cern.ch/root/License.html
> Imagine your are the package maintainer -- do you really want to ask the
> upstream authors for every typing error you fix in the documentation?

I am far from expert at licenses, but it seems to me that the phrasing "Users of
the software are asked to feed back problems, benefits, and/or suggestions about
the software to the ROOT Development Team" doesn't actually force people who
make changes to the software back to the ROOT people.  So I don't think that
would actually make it non-DFSG-free.

It might be worth asking the opinion of debian-legal@lists.debian.org on this
license.  If it is DFSG-free, you could request it to be packaged for Debian, or
package it yourself and find a DD to sponsor it into the archive.

Helen