On Mon, 2008-06-09 at 19:01 -0500, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote: > On 09/06/2008, Adam C Powell IV <hazelsct@debian.org> wrote: > > And after three weeks in the NEW queue, OpenCASCADE was ACCEPTED this > > morning into unstable! Yay! > > Awesome! Good job! This means it will make it into lenny? Very good news! > > > I think I will postpone re-splitting the package and ripping out the > > non-free parts > > I admit I haven't really been following the discussion which got very > technical, but now that it looks like I (er, we) have more software > readily available, I got curious. From the webpage, it looks like a > very powerful suite for numerical work, and I already see some things > I could use it for. Indeed, it's beautiful! > However, I am a strong believer in software freedom, especially, > *especially*, when it comes to scientific software (highest priority > for free software, in my opinion). I tried to understand right now > exactly why OpenCASCADE is non-free, and the restriction seems to be > about the method which modifications have to be published. Is this > correct? There also seems to be a plainly proprietary component in it? There are two reasons. First, there is a non-free component, the triangle software which is part of libTKMesh.so, which has a number of non-free aspects to its license. But that's small and not hard to remove. The second reason is that although the OCTPL seems to be a free license, upstream's interpretation of it is not. The paragraph starting with "In short" on http://www.opencascade.org/occ/license/ introduces the non-free requirement that one send all modifications to them, which is nowhere in the license itself. As mentioned, I'm going to try to rip out triangle and get the rest into main for lenny+1. > I see this happen so frequently, by developers who seem to > misunderstand the nature or motive of free software, particularly the > GPL, and want to fix it, often producing non-free results.[1] Have you > spoken to upstream about a possible relicensing? I think upstream > seldom chooses to change licensing terms, but a polite request might > still be in order. I couldn't easily track down in the discussion if > you had already done so or not, and what upstream responded. I have tried to contact them, to no avail. A couple of years ago Denis Barbier and Aurelien Jarno tried to package OCC, and contacted upstream, but didn't get any encouraging words in their replies. For details, see http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/12/msg00066.html for details. > Congrats on the packaging, Thanks! > - Jordi G. H. > > [1] I myself am sometimes a slight perpetrator of this too. I would > like to create a license which forbids military use of my software, > but I err on the side of the many free lawyers and their often lauded > law-fu used in the making of the GPL, so I choose not to add such a > restriction. Not that I think my software is particularly useful for > the military, but if there is anything I could do to hinder > professional murderers worldwide, I would do it. I guess you're probably not alone. Then again, some military labs contribute quite a bit to free software, e.g. the DARPAnet -> Internet. Off-topic though... -Adam -- GPG fingerprint: D54D 1AEE B11C CE9B A02B C5DD 526F 01E8 564E E4B6 Engineering consulting with open source tools http://www.opennovation.com/
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