Re: Making netpbm free

["Susan G. Kleinmann" <sgk@kleinmann.com>]

Lars Wirzenius:
> Santiago Vila Doncel:
> > Take the free parts of netpbm and create a new package called "freepbm"
> > from them.
> 
> Does anyone have any indication of what would need to be removed?
> I know netpbm can produce GIFs, so *togif would at least be zapped,
> but is there anything else?

I did 2 things with the copyrights in the netpbm package:
a) I sorted through all of them, identifying which packages had
   which copyright statements.  This sort is now part of the copyright
   file in the netpbm package.
b) In the process of (a), I identified about 20 programs that had no
   copyright statement, or some potentially restrictive copyright statement.
   Then I wrote to all the authors of all those programs that I could find, 
   and have received responses from all that I have written to that they 
   would be willing to place their programs under a free copyright.  

I had been planning on distributing a new version of netpbm with these
fixes:
-- put the whole thing under free, with the exceptions of the *togif
   and any lingering non-free programs.
-- add the programs that somehow got missed in the last build

The reason I say 'had' is that Frank Neumann advised me (on 4/23) that 
Ingo Wilken (Ingo.Wilken@informatik.uni-oldenburg.de) is preparing to
"a new netpbm release containing a lot of bug fixes, enhancements and 
manual page corrections he has collected over the past years."
I immediately wrote to Ingo and offered to help in any way, but I have
not heard from him yet.  It's probably time now to contact him again.

Meantime, I've been spending all my non-real-world-working-time on
the debian documentation.  Any advice on what to do and/or when to 
do it would be appreciated.

Susan


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