Hey debian-legal, I'm interested in getting the Spin model checker into debian. Back in 2005 there was some discussion here in [1]. At the time objections were raised because of licensing issues.
Per the forwarded email below, as of January 2016 Gerard Holzmann has been assigned copyright of the software by Lucent & has licensed spin 6.4.5 under 3-clause BSD [2]. Are there any additional legal hurdles to clear here before somebody could move forward RE: packaging up spin for debian? Cheers, Tom [1] "Bug#296369: ITP: spin -- Powerfull model checking and softwareverification tool": https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/02/msg00250.html [2] http://spinroot.com/spin/whatispin.html ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Holzmann, Gerard J (3400) <gerard.j.holzm...@jpl.nasa.gov> Date: Fri, Jan 1, 2016 at 4:18 PM Subject: SPIN license -- now BSD 3-Clause! To: Tom Lee <m...@tomlee.co> Hi Tom, It took a while, but we've finally been able to release Spin under a more standard open source license (the BSD 3-Clause license). Lucent was willing to transfer all copyrights on the software to me, so that I can do the new release. Hopefully this will now remove the problems that existed before to make Spin available more easily on Linux platforms (although I don't know how to do such a release myself.) The new version is on the spinroot website now (e.g., http://spinroot.com/spin/Src/ ) Very best wishes for the new year! -g ------------------------------ *From:* Tom Lee [m...@tomlee.co] *Sent:* Saturday, May 31, 2014 5:11 PM *To:* Holzmann, Gerard J (3400) *Subject:* Re: SPIN license On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 3:43 PM, Holzmann, Gerard J (3400) < gerard.j.holzm...@jpl.nasa.gov> wrote: > Hi Tom, > > Yeah I've heard the objections to the license. I'm not sure why that is > because the license applies only to commercial use -- all other use is just > free and requires no license. > I think Debian's objections in particular are basically just related to their fairly strict definitions of what it means to be "free software". I'm by no means a lawyer, but I can understand the concerns about "no license" in particular -- supposedly copyright holders (I guess Alcatel/Lucent in this case?) retain all rights by default so distribution etc. isn't allowed without an explicit license to do so: http://choosealicense.com/no-license/ > But.... I've asked Lucent (now Alcatel/Lucent) if they'd be willing to > release the software under a more generally accepted GPL license. They're > looking into this, but I haven't heard about progress since about > February. (I initiated that after I heard that they'd done the same for > the plan9 software, which used to be distributed under a very similar > commercial license as Spin has.) > Great news! Hope it all goes well. > It is a bit annoying that we can't get package it more conveniently yet. > Soon hopefully. > I'll be first in line to put a Debian package together when that happens. :) Thanks for taking the time to get back to me. Cheers, Tom -- *Tom Lee */ http://tomlee.co / @tglee <http://twitter.com/tglee>
