Bug#383940: ITP: aa -- astronomical almanac - calculate planet and star positions

["James R. Van Zandt" <jrvz@comcast.net>]

Nacho Barrientos Arias <chipi@criptonita.com> wrote:
>   > navigational stars is included.  Most of the algorithms employed are
>   > from The Astronomical Almanac (AA) published by the U.S. Government
>   > Printing Office.
>
>   Could this algorithms be categorized as free? Is possible (in the U.S)
>   add legal restrictions to this stuff?

It's possible to copyright a particular program that implements a free
algorithm.  Fortunately it is not a problem here, since Steve Moshier
is willing to license his work.  The Debian package of labplot
includes his "cephes" library which he licensed under GPL.  I'm
confident we can work something out for aa too.  (And of course I
won't upload the package until we do.)

               - Jim Van Zandt