Hi All, On Mon, Mar 09, 2015 at 02:01:18PM +0000, Iain R. Learmonth wrote: > I came across JNOS today and it looks like an interesting piece of software > that it would be nice to include in Debian. There was a fair bit of discussion around this so this is just an email to let everyone know what is happening. While this software falls directly under the scope of the team and it would be useful to have in Debian, this is non-free software, and so could not be included in main. There have been many many many contributors to this codebase, and relicensing will not be easy, though has not been entirely ruled out. This software has a lot of history behind it and I think it's awesome that it's still going and still in active use. I hope that licensing issues are not the reason this software falls out of use or ceases development when it does. The license used was a "semi-permissive" license. The only violation of the DFSG I could see was that it restricted use by field of endevour. Some seemed to think this was a good thing, and you're entitled to your opinions, but I'd just like to quickly outline a couple of examples where restricting software to "amateur radio use only" actually harms the hobby: 1) In the UK, it is permissible to use AX.25 on one of the CB channels. There are also provisions for this in Europe. Restricting the use of packet software to only amateur radio use, users of CB would not fall under this, as amateur radio is well defined in law. This means that those that may have found this software as a gateway into the hobby, where they find they are interested and get themselves licensed so they can experiment more, are left out. 2) I'm an Internet Engineering researcher at a University. I have recently been playing with enhancing TCP for use on AX.25 packet links. I'm not able to use amateur radio if I'm being paid for it so would have to perform these experiments in a bit of private spectrum. I would not be able to modify and use software that is restricted to "amateur radio use only" as I'm working in private spectrum, and again, this doesn't fit the legal definition of amateur radio. I would have to duplicate the work, then perform the experiments, and I wouldn't be able to contribute the code back directly. I would then have to put on my amateur radio hat and write the code again for it to be useful to the non-free software. It was mentioned that JNOS is restricted to using IP addresses from the 44/8 network. It's also worth mentioning that in the UK, the TCP/IP packet networks I've seen on VHF use RFC1918 addresses. To enable quick experimentation, this is far easier than going through the AMPRnet portal and waiting for a co-ordinator to allocate you a subnet to use. I would see this as a bug, not a feature. So, sadly, for now, JNOS will not be entering Debian. If you are looking for node software, Dave MM3ZRZ is currently working on packaging UROnode and this will be available in the repositories after the release of jessie. We will be looking to remove ax25-node from the repositories after this, which would free up the "node" name also allowing it to be used by nodejs if they want it. (They currently rename the interpreter to nodejs from node which has caused me, and I'm guessing others, some not easy to spot problems with scripts). Thanks, Iain. -- e: irl@fsfe.org w: iain.learmonth.me x: irl@jabber.fsfe.org t: EPVPN 2105 c: 2M0STB g: IO87we p: 1F72 607C 5FF2 CCD5 3F01 600D 56FF 9EA4 E984 6C49
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