Re: License of gpclib
Hi Toby,
thanks a lot for the prompt response. I admit I personally fail to
understand the reason for keeping a non-free license for some code just
because there are free alternatives. In practice we should ask authors
of the R code to switch to those alternatives which is a time consuming
and not very promising effort. Please note: It is not me / the R
packaging team using the code but we are facing upstream code (which
is partially not maintained actively any more) and need to ask those
upstream authors to touch their code that is working for them.
Thank you for asking Alan Murta anyway
Andreas.
On Thu, Jul 01, 2021 at 11:55:46AM +0100, Toby Howard wrote:
> Hi Andreas
>
> (I never received the mail of 09 June from Charles. I don't know what
> address he sent it to.)
>
> I have consulted GPC author Alan Murta and I regret to tell you that there
> are no plans to change the licensing arrangements for GPC. He has asked me
> to mention that there are other, free, polygon cliiping libraries, such as
> Clipper (http://www.angusj.com/delphi/clipper.php) which you may wish to use
> instead.
>
> With best wishes
>
> Toby
>
> On 01/07/2021 09:59, Andreas Tille wrote:
> > Hi again,
> >
> > I'm a member of the Debian R packaging team. Our list did not received
> > any response to Charles' mail nor did Charles contacted us regarding a
> > private mail. So I guess it might have slipped through somehow in your
> > busy life and I'd like to repeat this question which is to some extend
> > urgent for several packaging projects that are depending from R gpclib.
> >
> > It would be really great if you would consider relicensing the code
> > under a free license.
> >
> > Kind regards
> >
> > Andreas.
> >
> > On Wed, Jun 09, 2021 at 10:08:42PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> > > Dear Toby,
> > >
> > > I am contacting you as you were involved in commercial licensing of the
> > > GPC library.
> > >
> > > https://web.archive.org/web/20200131020441/http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~toby/alan/software/
> > >
> > > Although the University of Manchester does not distribute it anymore, it
> > > is still used in the R package gpclib, where the University is listed
> > > as copyright holder with a license that prohibits commercial use.
> > >
> > > This is unfortunate for Free software projects such as Debian, as we
> > > require that Free software licenses do not discriminate fields of
> > > endeavor, including commercial use. However, we would be keen to
> > > redistribute the gpclib if it were Free, and it would allow us to
> > > package some software that depend on it.
> > >
> > > Is there a way you could help us to get the gpclib relicensed by the
> > > University of Mancheter under a Free license ?
> > >
> > > (CCed: the Debian R mailing list. Please note it is publicly archived.)
> > >
> > > Best regards,
> > >
> > > Charles Plessy
> > >
> > > --
> > > Charles Plessy Nagahama, Yomitan, Okinawa, Japan
> > > Debian Med packaging team http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
> > > Tooting from work, https://mastodon.technology/@charles_plessy
> > > Tooting from home, https://framapiaf.org/@charles_plessy
> > >
> > >
> --
> Honorary Reader
> Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester
> www.cs.man.ac.uk/~toby @tobyhoward
>
>
--
http://fam-tille.de
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