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Re: Geant321 and geant4 in science package



Hi Ian, I all the patents debian team,
We were discussing about the including of the geant4 package in debian. Since there is an anti-patent point in http://geant4.web.cern.ch/geant4/license/LICENSE.html , we are not sure that it is possible to include geant4 in the science package. Please find the discussion and my answer further.


Yes, I was said that this anti-patent part (point 5 of your link) is the issue to include geant4 in the science package. I agree with you that it should not be a problem since it is "anti-patent" an a "secondary package". In addition, having this package should be a significant "pro" of debian for my community. but I'm a very beginner, and I though it would be wiser to forward this discussion to the patent team.

Christophe

On 01/24/2014 04:02 PM, Ian Jackson wrote:
Christophe Hugon writes ("Re: Geant321 and geant4 in science package"):
On 04/17/2013 02:14 AM, Lifeng Sun wrote:
I am the maintainer of geant321. Geant4 is not DFSG-conformed due to
an anti-patent clause in the license so we cannot maintain it as a
Debian official package [1].
Can someone point me to the previous discussion of the supposed
problems with this licence ?

I found this:
   https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/07/msg00016.html

I have read that thread and I don't agree with the conclusions.  I
agree that the litigation mutually-assured-destruction clause is
unfortunate and I wouldn't accept (say) a libc or init system with it.
But (even as someone who is a fan of GPL enforcement) I wouldn't be
too worried about it in the context of Geant4.

Note that the opinions you receive on debian-legal are, unfortunately,
often not representative of either (a) the consensus of the Debian
project as a whole, or (b) the views of the teams in Debian whose
responsibility it is to make licence acceptability decisions.

If you actually want a definitive view you need to ask ftpmaster.

Ian.


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