On Mon, 2007-11-12 at 11:43 +0530, Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray wrote:
I am packaging Starplot (
http://starplot.org/) for Fedora and would
like to discuss some license related issues.
The main Starplot program that gets built from
http://starplot.org/downloads/starplot-0.95.4.tar.gz is licensed under
GPLv2+. However, the Starplot data files distributed as
datahttp://starplot.org/data/gliese3-0.95.tar.gz and
http://starplot.org/data/yale5-0.95.tar.gz seem to be under a
"Redistributable, no modification permitted" license.
<long explanation snipped>
This meets the "Binary Firmware" criteria:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#BinaryFirmware
* The files are non-executable
* The files are not libraries.
* The files are standalone, not embedded in executable or library
code.
* Explicit permission is given by the owner to freely redistribute
without restrictions (this permission must be included, in
"writing", with the files in the packaging)
* The files must be necessary for the functionality of open source
code being included in Fedora.
Like you said, the modified .star files can't be distributed, but the
ADC data files are fine to package as is, under the "Redistributable, no
modification permitted".
Can't say I'm very happy about it, but it meets the criteria. I would
much rather see them work up something similar to the license we
negotiated with the EPSG for their dataset:
http://www.epsg.org/CurrentDB.html#use
~spot