Re: Eterm license violation and non-free
bob marlet wrote:
> hi, Eterm was removed from debian testing because a
> problem of license : there is a "cannot be sold for
> profit" in some source file. is it possible to include
> Eterm in non-free?
> see
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/03/msg00572.html
>
> "cannot be sold for profit" is ok with non-free?
> we need to have Eterm in etch, please can you solve
> this problem
>
> thank you
>From the thread you cite (please note, I haven't done any investigation
of the Eterm source code myself), it sounds as though the various source
code files are licensed in ways that are incompatible with each other
(4-clause BSD license, GPL, no-commercial-use license...) The licensing
bug is at http://bugs.debian.org/359707 although it doesn't have any
more info than what's in the debian-legal thread.
This means that an Eterm binary, which is a derived work of all the
source files, cannot be distributed at all, not even in non-free,
because the license terms conflict. The Debian maintainer and/or
upstream will need to solve this in order to get Eterm back into Etch.
You may want to email them to ask about the status of the problem.
Sorry this probably wasn't what you wanted to hear...
--
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu> Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University
GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
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