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cfitsio license change



Hi Aurelien,
(Cc: debian-astro)

Astropy just discovered [1] that cfitsio 4.4.0 is now under the NASA Open Source Agreement 1.2 (see licenses/LICENSE.txt). While this license is OSI approved [2], Debian sees it as not compliant with the DFSG [3].

This license change was done silently, it is not mentioned in the changelog.

I am not sure whether this is the reason that cfitsio-4.4.0 is not uploaded to Debian yet and if you are already aware of this. If we can't get the license change reverted, it would have catastrophic consequences for the astronomy ecosystem on Debian: many programs depend on it, and while we probably can still stick with an older version, the dependencies may come with updated dependency minversions in future.

Probably the best way would be to contact upstream and discuss this; maybe you already did this? Or do you have other ideas how to resolve the problem?

Best

Ole

[1] https://github.com/astropy/astropy/pull/16456/files/5a1843b2f9eda6fb367713460adba684bfc9e11f#diff-8ca2fa953f583044439880e4fee715b2c92152e7f21b7f0ff630a0ab0d98249e
[2] https://opensource.org/license/nasa1-3-php
[3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2011/04/msg00075.html


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