Re: portaudio license
Scripsit Dave Cunningham <spark@xdev.net>
> Is this software's license compatible with debian policy?
Please quote licences in full when sending them to Debian-legal.
This one is not long:
| License
| PortAudio Portable Real-Time Audio Library
| Copyright (c) 1999-2000 Ross Bencina and Phil Burk
|
| Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
| a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
| "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
| without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
| distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
| permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
| the following conditions:
|
| * The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
| included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
| * Any person wishing to distribute modifications to the Software
| is requested to send the modifications to the original developer
| so that they can be incorporated into the canonical version.
|
| THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
| EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
| MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ON INFRINGEMENT.
| IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY
| CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,
| TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
| SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
The stumbling point of this license is the second bulleted item. If
it is just a non-binding polite "request", it is fine. But if it is
a legal "condition" for getting rigts to modify etc., then the license
is not DFSG-free.
Since both of the words "request" and "condition" appear to apply to
the clause, it is ambigously phrase and Debian would take the
conservative position that the license is not free.
The situation changes if you can get the author to issue a license
clarification that makes it unambigous that the license is intended
to *legally* allow distribution of modifications that have not been
passed back to the author. (The author will still be at liberty to
think bad of modifiers who do not pass patches upwards).
> It'd be nice to have it in apt
I have difficulty seeing what a "real-time audio library" has to do in
apt. Palying music while packages are downloaded, perhaps?
> In the mean time, or if that is not possible, can I work the source
> into my project's tarball and compile it statically?
Code that is non-fee stays non-free if one includes it in another
context than the original (with very few pathological exceptions).
--
Henning Makholm "Den nyttige hjemmedatamat er og forbliver en myte.
Generelt kan der ikke peges på databehandlingsopgaver af
en sådan størrelsesorden og af en karaktér, som berettiger
forestillingerne om den nye hjemme- og husholdningsteknologi."
Reply to: