Aspell-en's questionable license
Richard,
It has come to the attention of debian-legal that the aspell-en package
is licensed under questionable terms. In particular, aspell-en uses the
"DEC Word List," which contains the following notice:
(NON-)COPYRIGHT STATUS
To the best of my knowledge, all the files I used to build these
wordlists were available for public distribution and use, at least
for non-commercial purposes. I have confirmed this assumption with
the authors of the lists, whenever they were known.
Therefore, it is safe to assume that the wordlists in this package
can also be freely copied, distributed, modified, and used for
personal, educational, and research purposes. (Use of these files in
commercial products may require written permission from DEC and/or
the authors of the original lists.)
...
Naturally, this violates the following clause of the Debian Free
Software Guidelines:
No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in
a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the
program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic
research.
The GNU/Aspell maintainer, Kevin Atkinson, has stated that you reviewed
and accepted this license as suitable for use with the GNU/Aspell
project. On behalf of debian-legal, I would like to ask if you could
clarify your position regarding the terms of the aspell-en license, and
in particular, the DEC Word List "license".
Debian's current stance was nicely summarized by Jeff Licquia in this
message:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200211/msg00041.html
Thank you for your time,
Brian
--
People said I was dumb, but I proved them!
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