Re: Licensing (was: Starting to play with packaging -- which release to use?)
Alejandro R. Mosteo writes on debian-ada@lists.debian.org:
> Ludovic Brenta writes:
>> Of course, licenses may prevent inclusion of your software in Debian; I
>> mention this for completeness since I believe you are only talking about
>> Free software. In case some of your software is non-Free, you can include
>> the Free parts in Debian and place the non-Free parts in a private
>> repository.
>
> While my code is indeed GPLd, there's a point which you can clarify for
> me (although I imagine the answer). There's indeed a 3rd party library [1]
> I use which license, as far as I could find, is:"available for academic
> research use; for other uses, contact William Cook for licensing options."
This is not even a license. A license covers copy, modification and
distribution of copyrighted work, not "use". If the original author wants
to restrict "use" of his work, the only way he can do that is by signing
a contract. So I definitely think you should ask this author for
clarification. I suspect that a dual-licensing scheme (GPL and LGPL)
would meet his desire to foster academic research but to seek monetary
compensation from commercial users.
> I guess this would require obtaining a more precise statement from the
> author. More troublesome is that this library furthermore requires another
> one which is supplied as a .a plus .h file, so no source. I guess this
> precludes any attempt at officially packaging it.Alex.
Whether or not you have a copy of the sources does not really matter. What
really matters is the license for this library.
If the license permits verbatim copying and redistribution, you can package
it and include it in the non-free section of Debian, with or without
sources.
It is illegal to distribute binaries of GPL'd software linked, statically
or dynamically, to proprietary libraries. This is due to the viral nature
of the GPL.
You can distribute the sources to your software under GPL and provide a
way for users to build your software for themselves and link it with the
proprietary libraries.
You can also write replacements for the proprietary libraries in Ada
and under GPL :)
--
Ludovic Brenta.
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