On Sat, 7 Nov 2009 20:10:07 +0100 Francesco Poli wrote:
On Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:34:31 +0100 Francesco Poli wrote:
[...]
On Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:20:57 +0100 Alastair McKinstry wrote:
[...]
I've been looking at packaging SILO, a mandatory dependency of VisIt.
[...]
This seems to be very awkward: a Free Software application (VisIt)
which links with a non-free library (Silo) by the same authors!
:-(
[...]
I got in touch with Silo's upstream.
They quickly replied in an encouraging manner.
First thing they told me is that Silo is no longer a mandatory
dependency for VisIt: they say it's been an *optional* dependency for
quite some time.
[...]
I think VisIt could be packaged for Debian (main) with the Silo plugin
disabled, while we wait for upstream to re-license Silo in a DFSG-free
manner...
Does it sound feasible?
Breaking news!!! :-)
After a bit of persuading by some people (including me!), and after a
long re-licensing process, Silo is now Free Software under a 3-clause
BSD license: see the September 20, 2010 release notes at
<https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/silo/release_notes.html>
and the Silo-4.8-bsd*tar.gz downloads at
<https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/silo/downloads.html>
Unfortunately a couple of compression features were not re-licensed and
hence the Free version of Silo lacks some compression capabilities
(again, see the release notes).
Anyway, the rest of the library now does comply with the DFSG! :-)
This means that we are now looking for someone who volunteers to
package the Silo library! ;-)