I apologize for contacting the debian-legal forum for an irrelevant matter.
Curt, who is an Associate Director of the Office of Technology Licensing for University of California, Berkeley, has stated that UCB is willing to relicense CIDER1b1 (1994) under the modified BSD license.
CIDER is used as Ngspice's mixed-level circuit and device simulator. CIDER has been licensed under UCB's "Research Software Agreement License" which restricts capitalizing on the software and requires compliance with U.S. export control laws. It was therefore not free software and did not comply with the Debian Free Software Guidelines, hence why it is found in Debian's non-free archive.
Curt has also stated that he and his team are unable to modify the page and associated tarball which are used to distribute CIDER1b1 at https://embedded.eecs.berkeley.edu/pubs/downloads/cider/index.htm
They are requesting advice as to how they should handle the change in license, particularly with respect to their current technical restriction.
Best regards,
Eric Kuzmenko
Eric Kuzmenko <eric.gralco@gmail.com> writes:
> I am not a lawyer so my advice on this matter may be erroneous.
Please note that the ‘debian-legal’ forum is also not a good one to seek
legal advice.
> Therefore, I am choosing to include the Free Software Foundation,
> Debian's legal group, and the Software Freedom Conservancy to weigh
> in; please advise us on what should be done.
Nor is the ‘debian-legal’ forum a good place for general advice about
software licensing. Our scope is limited to discussing the legal effects
on Debian recipients, of software packages that are or are proposed to
be in Debian. We don't claim to give advice beyond that.
> Here is something I believe you may be able to do (feel free to
> correct me):
A backward-sorted quote chain is not likely to be a reliable guide to
what is needed now. Could you summarise the issue, and the question
being asked of us here?
--
\ “I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To |
`\ be forced to tell lies is much worse.” —Oscar Wilde, _De |
_o__) Profundis_, 1897 |
Ben Finney <benf@boojum.com.au>