Re: aspell removed from stable - licence problems?
On Sun, 30 Nov 2003 02:21:53 +0100, Miernik <miernik@ctnet.pl> posted to
gmane.linux.debian.user:
> Can someone clarify the total confusion I have about aspell, it's
> removal from stable with woody release 3.0r2, and non-DSFG-gness of
> it's licence.
> http://www.debian.org/News/2003/20031121a
> http://master.debian.org/~joey/3.0r2/
> says "The license incorrectly says that it's LGPL but it is in fact a
> unique license which is non-DFSG-free."
> But there it is in "Accepted packages" section, while in DWN it's in
> "Removed packages" section.
> So is it removed or not after all?
> What is that unique licence?
To the extent that I've been able to figure things out after the fact,
aspell was removed because of a licensing conflict. Why exactly the
license was not DFSG-compliant is probably not relevant because it
seems that upstream switched to a different license.
I'm confused about Joey's announcement too, and I've seen others
wonder about it as well. I'm Cc:ing him -- could you please clarify?
Is the "accepted packages" section wrong or is something else wrong
somewhere?
What is curious is that <http://ftp.debian.org/pool/main/a/aspell>
contains a package in the 0.33 series which has a date stamp of Dec 7.
Is this supposed to somehow be going into stable at some point? That's
how I interpret this (out of the diff):
--- aspell-0.33.7.1.1.orig/debian/changelog
+++ aspell-0.33.7.1.1/debian/changelog
@@ -0,0 +1,304 @@
+aspell (0.33.7.1.1-9) stable; urgency=low
+
+ * Repackaged upstream source tarball with a newer version of SCOWL, the
+ wordlists making up aspell-en, that has the questionably licensed
+ wordlists removed. The aspell source package is now unquestionably
+ 100% DFSG-compliant.
+ * Gave aspell-en its own copyright file. It's not LGPL but rather the
+ SCOWL conglomerate license.
+
+ -- Brian Nelson <pyro@debian.org> Sun, 7 Dec 2003 00:23:13 -0800
The previous changelog entry is by the previous maintainer, from
February 2002.
Would this have to wait until r3 -- if there will be one before sarge
-- or is it possible for a package to creep back in sooner if it was
temporarily removed? (IMHO this should be possible.)
Incidentally the diff is humongous, containing mostly changes which I
don't think are relevant to Debian, which seem to be generated by the
autoconf tools. Is it correct to put those in a diff?
/* era */
--
formail -s procmail <http://www.iki.fi/era/spam/ >http://www.euro.cauce.org/
cat | more | cat<http://www.iki.fi/era/unix/award.html>http://www.debian.org/
Reply to: