Re: Debian package of OpenBUGS : issue with license of libOpenBUGS.so

Hi Andreas,

I am in contact with the developers. In order to give us the permission to distribute the binary, they propose to append the following sentence to the COPYING file in the Linux source package:

"[See each individual source file (.odc) for an exact license statement.] All of these sources are GPL-compatible, therefore the OpenBUGS shared library libOpenBUGS.so may be redistributed under the terms of the GPL version 3."

It's the good way to do this or we need a special permission to distribute the binary in a Debian package? For example, if they post a message with the permission on Debian Med mailing list it's adequate?

Best regards,

Dylan

2014-06-15 18:57 GMT+02:00 Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu>:

Hi Dylan,

On Sun, Jun 15, 2014 at 11:17:16AM +0200, Dylan wrote:
> > Despite the open licensing question currently libOpenBUGS.so is a binary
> > without source as far as I can see. So the correct way would be to ask
> > upstream for the source and remove the binary from the orig.tar.gz which
> > we use for the Debian package (by using Files-Excluded in
> > debian/copyright).
>
> I can not exclude libOpenBUGS.so because it is the core of OpenBUGS, its
> sources seems to be on sourceforge [1] but it was writing in Component
> Pascal which is impossible to compile on Linux for the moment. So, my plans
> was to package openbugs as non-free package which include libOpenBUGS.so as
> binary. It is impossible to do this in this way?

Hmmm, well, that's probably possible but not nice in any case. You
should definitely teach upstream to use FreePascal and explicitly ask for
permission to distribute the binary (and add this to the copyright file).

Kind regards

Andreas.