Non-free code in xgraph?

[Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>]

Hi,
In January, I had sent the following message to the Debian maintainer
of the xgraph package, but never got an answer. Maybe somebody on this
list could answer it:

   I'm a developer for Gentoo, where we are currently doing a license
   audit for a large number of packages. Especially, we want to get rid
   of the "as-is" license label [1] which is too unspecific and was
   misused over and over again. Our ebuild for sci-visualization/xgraph
   lists "as-is" as its license, so a bug was filed. [2]

   So after this introduction, here's the issue at hand: The Gentoo
   package is based on the tarball for version 12.1 from isi.edu, and
   applies the Debian changeset (xgraph_12.1-16.debian.tar.gz) to it.

   The original tarball contains a file copyright.h, which states that
   additions made by Paul Walker are non-free ("for education, academic
   research and non-commercial purposes", "provided [...] that no charge
   is made for such copies").

   Now the Debian changeset patches copyright.h and removes everything
   but the first two paragraphs from the license, i.e. the parts
   concerning the Paul Walker extensions. However, I don't see that the
   corresponding code would be removed. Especially, derivative.c is still
   there, which says: "This entire routine written by PW." Same for the
   animation code; there are comments with a "PW" tag at several places.

   Therefore I wonder how this change to copyright.h came about, and if
   this package really is Free Software?

   [1] http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/licenses/as-is?view=markup
   [2] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=452914

Cheers,
Ulrich