Re: METIS package
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Hi Joost,
On Saturday 30 June 2001 20:30, Joost Kooij wrote:
>
> You surely know best what the situation with the authors is like at the
> moment and how to handle it. But if you were to bring it up again to
> get any real statement from them on the issues, the social_contract page
> would seem like a good choice to me, wtwty.
Surely, the DFSG definition is very accessible and it may help the authors
give more informed decisions about which license to use.
It's in the interest of free software community to persuade software
developers to release their (especially publicly funded) software under free
software licenses. We cannot afford to write replacements for highly tuned
and optimized research code. For that reason, I think that a general
description (of what free software is all about) plus a summary of each
compliant license would be desirable.
Note that in this case, only an informal FAQ item about redistribution is
provided; a license is not even bundled with the software.
Given that there is BSD licensed software (and some GPL'd projects) where
this software package has been developed (as Scott M. Dier has kindly told
me), I believe there will be a better chance of persuasion if we offer them
to switch to a BSD-like license. I'm not in favor of BSD license generally,
but for this case I predict that it might be more suitable.
I will see if I can convince any of my personal contacts in their area to
investigate this matter.
Let's first have it in non-free and then we will see if the authors will be
willing to use a free software license.
Thanks a lot for your interest in this matter,
Regards,
- --
Eray Ozkural (exa) <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr>
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo
GPG public key fingerprint: 360C 852F 88B0 A745 F31B EA0F 7C07 AE16 874D 539C
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