[Debian-med-packaging] Please consider relicensing of old version of hep.aida to enable free colt.jar

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Tony,

many thanks for your quick reply.

On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 03:11:28AM -0800, Tony Johnson wrote:
> Hi, the version of hep.aida packaged with colt is very old, and not
> 100% compatible with the current version.

Yes, this is what I was told from a Debian Java team member.

> I would personally like to
> see hep.aida removed from colt, when we use colt we need to make our
> own distribution which removes the obsolete version of hep.aida.

Does this mean you could provide a new colt version adapted to current
hep.aida?  This would definitely help as well.  Unfortunately I only
found the old copy.  I'm no Java expert at all but from my naive view on
the file names in the FreeHEP implementations a lot of file names have
changed and I guess that it does not work with the old colt library.

> I am not sure where the licenses included with colt came from.

Same for me.  My idea was just that you as one of its named authors
might be autorised to relicense under the same conditions as recent
versions of FreeHEP (== just droping the additional clause).  This would
be the easiest and quickest help - even if I admit that switching to
more recent and maintained code would be the better way to go in the
long run.

> The current version of hep.aida is here:
> 
> http://aida.freehep.org/
> 
> It is unambigously licensed under pure LGPL. hep.aida only specifies
> the interface, the java implementation can be found here:
> 
> http://java.freehep.org/jaida/
> 
> again licensed under pure LGPL. Please let me know if I can help further.

Thanks for the offer to help.  As I said the quick (and not terrribly
dirty) help would be to give permission to drop the extra clause from
the license.  I guess sending this in publich to the mailing list in
CC would be perfectly sufficient.

The long term help would be a hint to a more recent colt version that
might work together with current FreeHEP aida.

Thanks for your offer to help

      Andreas.
 
> Tony
> 
> On 11/08/2013 02:51 AM, Andreas Tille wrote:
> >Hi Tony,
> >
> >I have packaged the colt Java library for the Debian distributions
> >because there are at least two packages needing this library.  The colt
> >library contains a copy of the hep.aida.* code which has a license[1]
> >that is considered non-free according to the Debian Free Software
> >Guidelines (DFSG [2]) since it violates item 6.  We understand the
> >intention behind the restriction that was put in addition to LGPL but
> >there is some consensus that this type of licenses are doing more bad
> >than good in general.
> >
> >Unfortunately there was no information how to contact the authors and
> >you seem to be the only one who remains connected to the successor of
> >hep.aida.* inside the FreeHEP project.  Could you do us a big favour and
> >either
> >
> >   1. Relicense the old hep.aida.* code to pure LGPL (or whatever free
> >      license you might prefer) or
> >
> >   2. give us a pointer to the author of hep.aida.* who might help us
> >      with our problem.
> >
> >Kind regards and thanks for your work on Free Software
> >
> >      Andreas.
> >
> >[1] http://acs.lbl.gov/software/colt/license.html
> >[2] http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
> >
> 

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