Licensing of Locfit (Local Regression and Likelihood)
Dear ladies and gentlemen,
I'm writing you on behalf of the Debian Med project[1] which is a
subproject of the Debian distribution targeting at making Debian the
best distribution for medical care and bioinformatic research. When we
tried to include Cufflinks[2] into Debian we stumbled upon a licensing
issue caused by the fact that it included Locfit[3] as third party library
and unfortunately Locfit does not fit the Debian Free Software
Guidelines[4].
Because Locfit[3] was originally developed inside your organisation
Copyright © 1996-2001 Lucent Technologies.
Catherine Loader,
email: c at herine.net
but we failed terribly to contact Catherine (see our report here[5]) I'm
trying hardly and with no better idea than to contact you directly
whether you possibly could clarify the licensing issue.
This single phrase is the critical part inside the license:
"Anyone wishing to use Locfit in any kind of comparative benchmark
study must contact and obtain permission from the Author."
because it conflicts with item
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
of DFSG[4]. The restriction seems to be hard to fullfill because we
failed to contact Catherine even when trying hard.
I wonder whether you could help us to drop this (historic ??)
restriction to the code or just apply a well known Free Software license
like GPL or BSD to the code.
Thanks in advance for any help and feel free to ask back for any
clarification if needed
Andreas Tille, Debian developer.
[1] http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
[2] http://cufflinks.cbcb.umd.edu/
[3] http://stat.bell-labs.com/project/locfit/
[4] http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
[5] http://lists.debian.org/debian-med/2012/02/msg00176.html
--
http://fam-tille.de
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