Replacing iausofa-c by erfa
Dear list,
in the course of bringing saods9 (back) into Debian, I created a package [1]
for the "SOFA" library of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) [2]
However, the license of the package is questionable wrt DFSG and the IAU
only cooperated by changing the license up to a certain
point. Specifically, one item is still in the license which is not
really nice to us ([3], §3c):
| The name(s) of all routine(s) in your derived work shall not
| include the prefix "iau" or "sofa" or trivial modifications
| thereof such as changes of case.
During the development of astropy (which in the first releases also
depended on SOFA), the discussion was brought up again, with the
solution of having a "free as in DFSG" (namely BSD-3) replacement called
"erfa" [4]. Erfa is basically a cut-and-paste version of SOFA, its
legality (incl. the licensing) is however confirmed by the original
author (IAU) [5].
The "erfa" package is now also in Debian [6], and I converted all
dependent packages (starlink-ast, starlink-pal, python-astropy) to use
erfa instead of SOFA.
Therefore, I would like now to move SOFA to non-free in jessie. Are
there any objections for this?
Best regards
Ole
[1] http://packages.debian.org/source/jessie/iausofa-c
[2] http://www.iausofa.org/index.html
[3] http://ftp-master.metadata.debian.org/changelogs//main/i/iausofa-c/iausofa-c_2012.03.01-1_copyright
[4] https://github.com/liberfa/erfa
[5] http://www.iausofa.org/thirdparty.html
[6] http://packages.debian.org/source/jessie/erfa
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