Hi Dirk,
I seem to recall that someone once mentioned packaging of Morten's Torque packages from Ubuntu. I also seem to recall Steffen saying that he was in contact with Morten. Based on quick search of my mail folder I can't findtraces of either. Could someone kindly refresh my memory?
We are now co-maintaining the package in Debian's pkg-escience team [0]. The version that is currently in Ubuntu is in one of the branches. Steffen and I had independently packaged Torque, but our efforts are now essentially merged in trunk.
It is my intention to upload the merged version to Ubuntu in the current development cycle (Lucid). There is a single bug in LP that can hopefully be closed along with that.
[ Google sees traces of informal packaging of Torque on non-Debian repos and prior debian-legal discussion -- did that ever progress beyond the earlier"Nope" ? ]
Oh, that. Yes it is a complicated situation, which doesn't get any better by the fact that the Torque maintainers don't give a d*mn about license issues. AFAIK several people have emailed them about it and they never answer. The current Torque effort is the result of several forked projects the history of which are pretty much lost in the annals... in my memory at least :-)
In Ubuntu, the torque package resides in "Multiverse" which corresponds to the "non-free" section of Debian. Torque has it's own peculiar license which tends to make the archive-admins nervous. It is my conviction however, that Torque in practice is FOSS perhaps even FLOSS.
Cheers, Morten [0] http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/pkg-escience/torque/