Eray Ozkural (exa) wrote:
Eray, the point is that the package has to have some internal evidence of that distribution permission and any restrictions in the copyright file. I think that if you just cut and paste from your email to the author and his reply into copyright, that might suffice. This would also notify users that they can't freely distribute metis with other distributions, as the author has only given such permission for Debian. (-devel people, will this satisfy everyone?)Matt Zimmerman wrote:Perhaps you should post the exact language that the author used when granting this permission? That would be the definitive source of information. If she said "You have my permission to redistribute", that is different from "Debian has my permission to redistribute".I asked him "permission on behalf of Debian/GNU Linux distribution" and he said "yes". The author's a very busy man, and his reply (which I might have deleted) is sufficient given the informal nature of the license, the software being a university project and the widespread distribution of metis (available through Internet). In other words, Debian doesn't do anything illegal by distributing metis, so I take it that the previous short thread about metis did reach a correct conclusion. (in which it was agreed that we could distribute metis in the non-free distro)
Please take this step and we'll try another upload.
I've been planning to suggest the QPL to the author, which would accomplish this goal. If he consents and offers it under this license without restriction to Debian, then metis can go into main.I think the point of the license was that if you want to incorporate metis into a commercial code, they want to know it and perhaps even license it separately. [but of course this is wildly off topic for our discussion]
P.S. How are [h/p]metis coming along? Zeen, -- -Adam P. GPG fingerprint: D54D 1AEE B11C CE9B A02B C5DD 526F 01E8 564E E4B6Welcome to the best software in the world today cafe! <http://lyre.mit.edu/%7Epowell/The_Best_Stuff_In_The_World_Today_Cafe.ogg>