I am confused about the the licensing conditions of the octave-gpcl package and I need some advise from the debian-legalers.
I am both the upstream author and the maintainer of octave-gpcl. This package provides the Octave (www.octave.org) binding for the General Polygon Clipper library (http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~toby/alan/software/). The GPC library is released under a non-free license and is also packaged for Debian by me (libgpcl0 and libgpcl-dev). The problem arises because the octave-gpcl packages produces a loadable module (or plugin) in the form of a *.oct file that is loaded by Octave at run-time. However, Octave is released under the GPL (not the LGPL) meaning that it is not allowed to link any non-GPL compatible product against it and redistribute the whole thing. The situation seems to be similar to that of the readline library. My questions are: (1) should I move the octave-gpcl package from contrib to non-free? (2) If I could keep octave-gpcl under a GPL-compatible license (although it links against a non-free library), wouldn't that be an infringement of the GPL, which is Octave's license? (3) In any event, would it be legal at all to distribute Octave add-ons that link against non-free external libraries? (4) How would the situation be if Octave were released under the LGPL? [Please, keep Cc: to [EMAIL PROTECTED] I hope the cross-posting is not abusive. M-F-T set accordingly.] Thanks, -- Rafael -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]