Friday, 30 May 2008

Nothing is ever simple

Reading CRANberries this morning I remembered that I’d never gotten around to packaging Amelia for Debian. So I dutifully filed my ITP and got to work on adapting the package to build with Debian, which thanks to Dirk’s hackery on R support in cdbs was pretty easy—copy over the debian directory from my Zelig package, update the copyright file, fix up the control file, update the Debian changelog, fix a lintian warning or two (FSF address in the copyright file), and it’s basically done.

Then I discovered that Amelia also throws in a couple of Tcl/Tk libraries. One, BWidget is already packaged, so all I had to do was delete the copy that’s installed by the Amelia package and add a dependency on it. The other is Combobox, the exact license of which follows:

completely, totally, free. I retain copyright but you are free to use the code however you see fit. Don’t be mean.

Yay. I get to play license negotiator again. I really love creating extra work I really don’t need for myself…

2 comments:

Any views expressed in these comments are solely those of their authors; they do not reflect the views of the authors of Signifying Nothing, unless attributed to one of us.
[Permalink] 1. Ross Reedstrom wrote @ Fri, 30 May 2008, 5:10 pm CDT:

Hmm, I thought I recognized that name from my Tcl days (years ago), so I grabbed the tarball, and, while that line does in fact occur in the ANNOUNCE, the copyright and license proper seem to be in the README, but is still incomplete. Grants only a use-license, no modify-and-redistribute.

from README:

Combobox version 2.3
Copyright© 1998–2003, Bryan Douglas Oakley
All Rights Reserved.

<snip>

This software is provided AS-IS with no waranty expressed or
implied. This software may be used free of charge, though I would
appreciate it if you give credit where credit is due and mention my
name when you use it.

 

I’ve been in contact with Bryan today and it looks like he will relicense it under the same license as Tcl/Tk, which is DFSG-free and seems to be GPL-compatible (although I can’t find anything on the FSF‘s licensing page either way). So now it looks like I’m 2-for-2 in getting things relicensed to get into Debian (yay!).

 
Comments are now closed on this post.