On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 12:50:58PM +0900, GOTO Masanori wrote: > At Mon, 26 Aug 2002 00:23:30 -0700, Osamu Aoki wrote: > > It looks like Arai-san [EMAIL PROTECTED] seems to be most active. > > http://ns103.net/~arai is his URL > > > > He has new autoconf version. > > > > It looks to me people are treating almost like public domain as long as > > New sources are available to general public.
Here I meant "most Japanese non-commercial entity" by "people". Debian can not treat it as PD with current license for sure. > It's worth considering to include/replace with his patch. > It includes some more features. My little concern is he does not > state any copyright issues clearly. I try to contact to him. My understanding is what ever Arai-san did is copyright of him. Let's try to let him license his portion with BSD without AD clause (i.e. MIT-X) license. Problem is original software writers who wrote core parts have to agree to a new DSFG compliant license. Otherwise this will not go into MAIN. I think most of them will agree either GPL or X for their part of contribution if we contact them properly. Here is my research result for the original copyright holders. Upstream authors, maintainers: LHarc 0.01-1.00: Yooichi Tagawa (LHa code taken from here, 1988-1989) Nikkei-mix ID: y.tagawa (Now this is defunct BBS, Licensing term in manual page come from his licence for lharc) His new web page seems to be www2s.biglibe.ne.jp/~yex/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] is the contact e-mail address for another software. Page updated at least July/2001 LHa 0.01-1.00: Masaru Oki (LHa original author, 1991-1992) Suse.com list e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] LHa 1.10-1.14: Nobutaka Watazaki (Last official release? 1993-1995) No e-mail available (Any idea?) Lha 1.14a-1.14e: Tsugio Okamoto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (1996-2000) LHa 1.15 Recent one on NET LHA autoconf version: Arai-san <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (2002) All these people has some claim on copyright statement on source files. lharc.c provides a good summary. (Please use that for README.Debian) Problem is there is no e-mail available for the first 3 primary authors. They are asking to be contacted by e-mail but there is no mention. Anyway, getting license corrected for old softwares is very difficult. ==================================================================== Note: By the way, patch with name mentioned are: 0.01-1.00 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (rename.c -> utils.c) Takayuki Honma (time related stuff, lhadd.c) [EMAIL PROTECTED] of Tokyo (EUC) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Minix patch) These people's names except ishikawa do not exist in current source, also lhadd.c which seems to be affected are marked as "source all changed" by Watazaki. I would call them trivial contribution and do not thin critical for copyright issue. Also in Makefile, there is mention on # for OSK # V1.08 1990.10.09 Sakura Tomozou # V2.00 + lzhuf4/5 1990.10.26 but this is porting only and should not concern Debian. -- ~\^o^/~~~ ~\^.^/~~~ ~\^*^/~~~ ~\^_^/~~~ ~\^+^/~~~ ~\^:^/~~~ ~\^v^/~~~ +++++ Osamu Aoki @ Cupertino CA USA, GPG-key: A8061F32 .''`. Debian Reference: post-installation user's guide for non-developers : :' : http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ also http://qref.sf.net `. `' "Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software" --- Social Contract