Bug#705152: Non-free code in xgraph? [copyright.h and derivative.c for starters.]
Package: xgraph
Severity: serious
Version: 12.1-15
Ulrich Mueller reported this to debian-legal@lists.debian.org. FWICT,
at least the contents of the source package are not distributable by
Debian in main. It's possible that the binary packages do not contain
any work which is copyrighted by Paul Walker, but the source packages
at least need to be altered to remove this non-free, non-distributable
code. [If I and Ulrich Mueller has misinterpreted what is going on
here, please let us know, and if at all possible, update
debian/copyright to explain in some future upload so we and others
don't revisit this erroneously in the future.]
On Wed, 10 Apr 2013, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> 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").
Heh. That's not going to work. If that's actually the case, this code
has to be removed from the orig.tar.gz that Debian distributes.
> 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?
I doubt that it is, or at least, the copyright and changes aren't
documented well enough for Debian to be able to properly distribute
this.
> [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
Don Armstrong
--
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Lie if you have to.
-- hugh macleod http://www.gapingvoid.com/archives/batch20.php
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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