Re: Question about a licensing problem
Hi Gert,
On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 01:17:04PM +0100, Gert Wollny wrote:
> ...
>
> * My first course of action would be to ask the authors of maxflow
> to relicense. I remember to have seen a nice example letter one of
> the Debian-med pages for doing just that, but right now I can't find
> it.
> Anyone can point me to it?
I have several times asked for relicensing and while I think we might
create some template for this the actual cases always were different
enough to not fit into a common template. Some things I always try
to approach is to write something like:
"I'm writing you on behalf of the Debian Med team"
to stress the fact that it is not Joe Randomhacker who has some funny
request. Since even Debian Med might not be as widely known as it
should (hey, please blame not me about this) I also always include a
link to the tasks page in this case something like:
"We are trying to include all Free Software with relevance to
medicine into the official Debian distribution. Here you can
see the section of our work you might be interested in:
http://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/imaging
As you can see we also explicitly mention the publications of
the authors who have written the software in question."
So far to make the authors curious and open minded about our intent.
Then you come to the point and ask for relicensing. Note: One reason
for the license change could be that they might include third party
software which does not leave them the freedom to choose the license.
> Considering that the authors changed from a GPL license with 2.21 to
> a non-free license, I'm not very optimistic about them willing to
> change the license. Which means we have to look for the non-free
> option.
This sounds probable.
> Given that with the current license not even the source code is
> redistributable, how could this be done? Could we add pre-compiled
> static libraries of the libraries for supported architectures to the
> upload (we would probably restrict this to amd64 and i386)? This
> would make the package similar to the AMD and Nvidia drivers that
> ship binary blobs that get compiled into the final package.
Hmmm, whithout having read the licenses of any of these I wonder if the
source code is not redistributable you simply need to make sure that
the binary code is.
BTW, regarding Paul's answer: I simply guess that we as Debian
maintainers do not have the power to become upstream for a bunch of
alternatives to non-free sofware. I agree in an ideal world we should
... but in an ideal world even upstream should free their code
themselves.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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