On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 02:09:41PM -0500, Kevin McCarty wrote:
> Could someone please add Root (http://root.cern.ch/) to the list of software
> that cannot be packaged, http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/unable-to-package
> the software contains what appears to be code derived from cernlib
> (GPL) [3] and Xclass (LGPL) [4] while having a license incompatible
> with either.
They likely are allowed to use cernlib, however xclass is a different
matter.
I had a look at the root source code, here is a copyright notice quoted
from TGCanvas.cxx:
/*************************************************************************
* Copyright (C) 1995-2000, Rene Brun and Fons Rademakers. *
* All rights reserved. *
* *
* For the licensing terms see $ROOTSYS/LICENSE. *
* For the list of contributors see $ROOTSYS/README/CREDITS. *
*************************************************************************/
/**************************************************************************
This source is based on Xclass95, a Win95-looking GUI toolkit.
Copyright (C) 1996, 1997 David Barth, Ricky Ralston, Hector Peraza.
Xclass95 is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public
License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
**************************************************************************/
This appears to be a LGPL violation. The xclass copyright could require the
authors of root to release these gui classes under the LGPL. I don't think
other parts of root would be affected, if they only use the gui classes as a
library, but they might decide to release the whole thing under a single
LGPL-compatible license.
> This is most unfortunate, since Root is a very useful tool and a
> number of interesting projects are based on it, but I don't see how
> Debian can legally package it, even in non-free, until upstream
> changes their license.
I don't see how upstream can legally package it until they change their
license, or rewrite the code that has been derived from xclass.
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
