Re: License of ROOT: acceptable for non-free?
On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, Kevin B. McCarty wrote:
> Clearly the license is non-free due to the requirement that modified
> versions not be distributed without the permission of the authors. My
> question is this: if I were to obtain permission from the authors for
> Debian to distribute packaged binaries of Root, would that be sufficient
> for it to go into non-free?
I don't think so. Debian isn't enough of a well-defined entity for a
specific grant of permission to work, even for non-free. The author would
have to grant permission for anyone to redistribute the package before
it should even go in non-free.
> As a side issue, a few non-essential programs in the Root tree link to
> Cernlib libraries, which are GPL [3]. Hence if those programs are not GPL
> themselves, they cannot legally be distributed, correct? (Is this true
> for both statically and dynamically linked binaries?) If it is OK to
> package the remainder of Root, I will mention this to upstream.
Yup, distributing it (even dynamically linked) infringes the copyright on
the Cernlib libraries.
--
Mark Rafn dagon@dagon.net <http://www.dagon.net/>
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