On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 11:35:07AM -0500, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 11:21:24AM -0500, Justin Pryzby wrote:
> > IRAF has a kind of custom government license which was previously
> > decided [0] to be free. IRAF wants to link with NCAR which is (now)
> > available under the GPL. Is that allowed, even though IRAF is not
> > GPL? IRAF is not a "derivitive" of NCAR, although the resulting
> > executable binaries would be, I guess. GPL seems to say so:
[...]
> > If that is the case, then it seems that I should consider creating a
> > complementary NCAR package ("when you distribute them as separate
> > works"), on which IRAF would have build and runtime dependencies (I
> > don't know if the upstream NCAR build intends for the libraries to be
> > shared .so files, or if they even intend for the libraries to be
> > installed on a runtime-only system, but no matter).
>
> There's no need to split them up if you wouldn't otherwise. That's not
> what the above clause is talking about.
It is maybe complicated than I let on; IRAF includes code from NCAR
1.00, but under a nonfree license. NCAR 4.X is GPL, and includes
mostly-minor differences (some bugfixes, I think, and some changes
that the IRAF group made). I contacted NCAR about making a statement
that 1.00 was available under the GPL, but thats an impossibility,
because they don't want the overhead of making source code available
and similar. So, I figure I'll package libncar-graphics, make IRAF
{,build-}depend on it, and include in the library any changes
necessary to make IRAF work (possibly as modifications to the code,
and possibly as separate routines).
Thanks,
Justin
