Re: Question about non-free packages
Hi Attila,
Attila Kovacs <attila.kovacs@cfa.harvard.edu> writes:
> A while ago I started with packaging the NAIF CSPICE Toolkit (NASA's
> venerable but reliable C toolkit for handling JPL [SPK] ephemeris
> files). However, it all went on hold because of licensing issues...
>
> I have had lots of discussion with the Fedora folks, and have began
> further discussion with SPDX. It looks like that the upstream license
> is not quite open-source by today's definitions (it looks like it's a
> SunRPC-like license, which is too restrictive, certainly for Fedora).
One other way to handle this would be to (maybe together with the Fedora
people) contact NASA in order to adjust the license to our and their
needs. NASA recently started to change their view to Open Source and is
trying to move towards it. Specifically having two distributions wanting
to package it could give them the right push :-)
One contact that coud help here is Steven Crawford <crawfordsm@gmail.com>
who is working as a Science Data Officer at NASA and already helped on
other places go get the software free. If you contact him, you can give
my name as reference.
That requires probably more caution than having the package in
"unstable", but it may help the whole community to pull this package
into the Open Source world.
Best redgards
Ole
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