On Tue, 28 Aug 2012 15:37:46 +0200 Florian Rothmaier wrote:
> Hi to everyone involved in debian-legal,
Hello!
>
> I've got a licensing issue related to the astronomical Java library
> "fits" ("nom.tam.fits") from Thomas McGlynn.
>
> The newest release can be obtained at:
> http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/heasarc/fits/java/v1.0/v1.08.1/ .
>
> In the code, I find the following copyright statement:
> /* Copyright: Thomas McGlynn 1997-1999.
> * This code may be used for any purpose, non-commercial
> * or commercial so long as this copyright notice is retained
> * in the source code or included in or referred to in any
> * derived software.
> */
> When I wrote an e-mail to Thomas McGlynn, he replied:
> "I believe the lines you quote are themselves the entirety of the
> license. There was no intent to associate this with any specific more
> general license."
Unfortunately these "license lines" do not seem to be enough to make the
library clearly Free Software.
I think they are far too vague and implicit:
- the term "use" is ambiguous at best; does it just cover running a
program that links with library? or is it implicitly intended to
also cover other activities such as copying, modification,
redistribution of verbatim and modified copies?
- there's no explicit permission to copy and redistribute
- there is a reference to derived software, but no explicit
permission to create and distribute such derived software
I believe that such "license lines" make the library unsuitable for
distribution in Debian (main) or even in the non-free archive.
>
> Now, I'm not sure how to proceed.
[...]
> I'd appreciate your help!
If you want this library to be included in Debian, I think you should
contact its copyright holder again and persuade him to re-license the
library in a clearly DFSG-free manner, preferably under the terms of a
well known and widely used Free Software license.
I would personally recommend the copyright holder to re-license the
library under the terms of the Expat/MIT license [1], which is very
simple and similar in spirit to the goals that were probably in the
mind of the drafter of the above quoted "license lines".
[1] http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt
>
> Thanks in advance
You're welcome, I hope this helps.
> and please cc me in your replies since I'm not
> subscribed to "debian-legal".
Done.
Bye and good luck with your persuasion effort!
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