Re: Root license (Was: Hello)
Argh, I of course meant to send this to the list. Brett, my apologies
for making you see it twice.
On 8/12/05, Brett Viren <bv@bnl.gov> wrote:
> Thomas Weber <weber@num.uni-sb.de> writes:
> >
> > Sorry, lost attribution:
> >>
> >> In the discussion someone notices that beeing linked to (and beeing
> >> distributed inside) cernlib (covered by the GPL) ROOT
> >> must be released under the GPL and the sentence you quote is
> >> in violation of the licence. If someone is really interested in
> >> packaging ROOT, (s)he should probably politely mail the upstream
> >> author and make them aware of the problem, they could possibly just
> >> release ROOT under the GPL making it perfectly suitable for main (a
> >> great coup!)
> >
> > Well, as you seem to be interested, I suggest that you contact the ROOT
> > authors.
>
> I've asked recently. Of course the main developers and likely all
> contributors are very aware of the issue. ROOT has always been an
> all-but-that-one-clause Free Software project. At the risk of
> spoiling any surprises, a fix to the technicality can be expected.
Without any intent of being snarky, I have to say: I'll believe it
when I see it. Not having any inside information, I only know that
the ROOT developers have been stating they will fix the license for
about five years now.
That said, I will be most pleased and grateful if/when this license
fix comes about. I do much of my analysis with ROOT, and it is a
superb tool. My experiment (Borexino, a solar neutrino observatory)
has officially adopted it as a basis for its data analysis toolkit. I
will be thrilled to see ROOT finally be packaged for Debian; it will
produce positive results for both projects.
regards,
--
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu> Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University
GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
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