On 08 Jan 2004 11:10:27 +0200 era+debian@iki.fi wrote: > 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? <snip> There was a thread about this a while back, called "aspell with mutt", if I remember correctly. Brian Nelson (pyro@debian.org) explained the problem with aspell then. He said: "The problem with aspell 0.33 and earlier was that the aspell utility and the aspell-en dictionary were distributed together in a single tarball, so it was assumed that the entire contents of the tarball were under the aspell utility license (LGPL). However, when aspell 0.50 was released, the aspell utility and the aspell-en were separated into distinct tarballs. When I was packaging 0.50 a little over a year ago, I noticed that aspell-en actually had a unique license with wording that did not comply with the DFSG. However, the validity of the non-free license was questionable since, at least in the US, wordlists are not copyrightable. Furthermore, the questionable wording in the license was not actually written by the author of the wordlist (someone at DEC, a US company), but rather someone who had reused the wordlist and basically stated, "as far as I know, you may use this wordlist for non-commercial purposes." The original author probably never claimed a copyright because it wasn't copyrightable in his or her country. "In my opinion, the only problem with the aspell package in woody was the/usr/share/doc/aspell-en/copyright stating the license was LGPL when in fact in was not. I did not see any real problem with the terms of the license. However, the stable release manager felt otherwise and removed the entire package from main. "However, since the removal broke a lot of dependencies in stable, aspell 0.33 will be reintroduced to main in 3.0r3. To comply with the RM's wishes, I'll have to find a way to replace the "non-free" wordlists with the updated free version, but it will come back pretty soon, I hope." HTH, Jacob ----- GnuPG Key: 1024D/16377135 Got Linux? http://www.linux.org
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