Dear Carsten, thanks a lot for your quick response.
On Sat, Nov 07, 2020 at 07:20:47PM +0100, carsten.dorm...@biom.uni-freiburg.de wrote: > To be honest, I had scanned the licence statement in that file, but not > noticed the notice. > > The code in bipartite is based on code by Aaron Clauset, who himself used the > Mersenne Twister to avoid the relatively short random number period. We > (Rouven Strauss and I) did not touch that bit of code at all; our work was > solely on the bit produced by Aaron. His code is available publicly here: > http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~aaronc/hierarchy/ > <http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~aaronc/hierarchy/> > > I never wrote to any of the emails listed. It is indeed somewhat awkward and > I have no idea what to do about it. > > Wikipedia does not square with the notice you found: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_Twister > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_Twister>, calling it "permissively > licensed". > > Given Debian's merit of being very careful with such licenses, I can only ask > you for suggestions: is there anything I can do, you think, to push the > Mersenne Twister towards a GPL-like license? I think the only way is to convince the copyright holders to drop that paragraph and use one of the known licenses (not necessarily GPL even if this would probably a nicely fitting choice for your own code). Kind regards Andreas. > > On 7. Nov 2020, at 17:59, Andreas Tille <andr...@fam-tille.de> wrote: > > > > Hi, > > > > I intend to package bipartite for Debian since some R package needs > > it to run its test suite. Our ftpmaster who is checking licensing > > issues stumbled upon the file src\MersenneTwister.h. It contains > > an additional clause to the license which says: > > > > // The original code included the following notice: > > // > > // When you use this, send an email to: matum...@math.keio.ac.jp > > // with an appropriate reference to your work. > > // > > // It would be nice to CC: rjwag...@writeme.com and > > co...@math.washington.edu > > // when you write. > > > > Would you please clarify how far the "original code" is changed? Its > > also hard to interpret what the "send an email to" might mean. Should > > every user who is using the bipartite package send an e-mail to the > > authors? That's really hard to realise since we can not guarantee that > > every user will read the copyright statement of all software that is > > installed. So some clarification what that clause might mean would be > > appreciated. > > > > Kind regards > > > > Andreas. > > > > ----- Forwarded message from Joerg Jaspert > > <ftpmas...@ftp-master.debian.org> ----- > > > > Date: Fri, 06 Nov 2020 23:00:08 +0000 > > From: Joerg Jaspert <ftpmas...@ftp-master.debian.org> > > To: Andreas Tille <ti...@debian.org>, Debian R Packages Maintainers > > <r-pkg-t...@alioth-lists.debian.net> > > Subject: r-cran-bipartite_2.15-1_amd64.changes REJECTED > > > > > > Hi Maintainer, > > > > rejected, sorry, but src\MersenneTwister.h is not GPL. > > Also, how much is that code there based on "the original code"? See > > the paragraph directly below the license. The requirement there is > > *NOT* nice for inclusion in Debian. > > > > -- > > bye Joerg > > > > > > > > === > > > > Please feel free to respond to this email if you don't understand why > > your files were rejected, or if you upload new files which address our > > concerns. > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > R-pkg-team mailing list > > r-pkg-t...@alioth-lists.debian.net > > https://alioth-lists.debian.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r-pkg-team > > > > ----- End forwarded message ----- > > > > -- > > http://fam-tille.de > > — — — — — — > Carsten Dormann > > Professor of Biometry and Environmental System Analysis > Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources > University of Freiburg > Tennenbacher Str. 4 > 79106 Freiburg > > Tel.: 0049 (0)761 203-3750 > Fax.: 0049 (0)761 203 3751 > Email: carsten.dorm...@biom.uni-freiburg.de > -- http://fam-tille.de
