Re: Non-free package licenses and replacements

[Niklas Vainio <niklas.vainio@iki.fi>]

On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 07:49:05PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> This is a good effort.  As a maintainer of three non-free packages
> (molphy, treetool, phylip) I can assure you that I regularly try
> to contact the authors of these programms.  For the first two
> (molphy and treetool) it is just the problem that the authors are
> not available any more.  I'm very positive that they would clarify
> the license to be free once the DFSG criteria would be explained to
> them.  Perhaps we might need some kind of echelon system to find
> out the current address of the authors to be able to ask them.

Did you try snail-mail? If you can't find their snail-mail address because
they live in different country, perhaps somebody reading debian-devel can
help you and get a local phonebook or something to find contact information
if you tell who you are looking for.

> The third one phylip has kind of a stuborn author - I failed to
> explain the advantage and the sense of a free license ...

Would PAL (http://www.cebl.auckland.ac.nz/pal-project/features.html) work as
a replacement? Or is it something totally different? (I know nothing about
phylogenetics...)

Thanks,
    - Nikke

-- 
Niklas Vainio <niklas.vainio@iki.fi>