On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, Kevin B. McCarty wrote: > Clearly the license is non-free due to the requirement that modified > versions not be distributed without the permission of the authors. My > question is this: if I were to obtain permission from the authors for > Debian to distribute packaged binaries of Root, would that be sufficient > for it to go into non-free?
I don't think so. Debian isn't enough of a well-defined entity for a specific grant of permission to work, even for non-free. The author would have to grant permission for anyone to redistribute the package before it should even go in non-free. > As a side issue, a few non-essential programs in the Root tree link to > Cernlib libraries, which are GPL [3]. Hence if those programs are not GPL > themselves, they cannot legally be distributed, correct? (Is this true > for both statically and dynamically linked binaries?) If it is OK to > package the remainder of Root, I will mention this to upstream. Yup, distributing it (even dynamically linked) infringes the copyright on the Cernlib libraries. -- Mark Rafn [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://www.dagon.net/>
