Re: [B2-devel] Basilisk II releases and copyright questions

[Giulio P. <giu...@gm...>]

Hi Alexei!

Il 29/03/2012 22:18, Alexei Svitkine ha scritto:
> On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 4:17 PM, Alexei Svitkine
> <ale...@gm...> wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 1:10 PM, Giulio Paci <giu...@gm...> wrote:
>>> Hi to all!
>>>        Recently I started collaborating to package Basilisk II for Debian and
>>> now we have a working package. (Package development has been carried out
>>> in a git repository
>>> http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/basilisk2.git;a=summary)
>>>
>>> 1) During the package development we noticed that much time has passed
>>> since latest official release. Is a new official release planned?
>>> Official releases are not a requirement, but helps keep track of where a
>>> package come from.
>>
>> Unfortunately, the project does not have enough resources to make
>> official releases. So we have either CVS tip of tree, or unofficial
>> releases that are build / posted at emaculation.com from arbitrary CVS
>> revisions.

So there is no place where I can find sources released, right? The
current package is built on a snapshot of the CVS tree. Is there any way
to select revision that are more stable?

>>> 2) Every Debian package ships a copyright file
>>> (http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/basilisk2.git;a=blob;f=debian/copyright;h=f2a03b994a88348ebb430e50abc96b31fb4dbe0b;hb=HEAD)
>>> that reports the copyright of all the files in the package.
>>> Unfortunately we noticed that software with incompatible licenses (BSD
>>> (4 clause) and GPL-2+) or with unknown licenses are mixed together. Is
>>> there anything that can be done to fix this?
>>
>> Hopefully, we can resolve this. I'm not sure I completely understand
>> the output of this tool, so let me know if the following is correct,
>> in terms of what the tool is reporting:

You understood exactly the copyright file content.

>> 1. A bunch of the code under slip/ is using BSD 4-clause, which is not
>> compatible with GPL.
> oops typo, that should read "a bunch of code under *slirp/"

Right. After manual inspection I have seen no other BSD 4-clause file. I
also checked the files in slirp/ that have a modified BSD 4-clause
license: they have 3 clauses, but the incompatible one is still there.

>> 2. A bunch of files don't have licenses - hence the tool prints
>> "License: UNKNOWN", "FIXME".
>>
>> Is my understanding of that output correct?
>>
>> For 1, perhaps we can find a newer version of the slirp code that has
>> a 3-clause BSD license or something else compatible with the GPL. I'll
>> have to look. In the mean time, I think there is an option to
>> ./configure Basilisk to not include support for SLIRP networking,
>> which should result in that code not being used.

I would prefer the first solution, but the second one is also valid.
I do not see the option to remove slirp support in the configure script,
do you have any suggestion?

>> For 2, we'll have to track down where those files come from (I think
>> also from other projects) - most likely they should be GPL licensed.
>> I'll investigate.

Thank you very much! I really want to see Basilisk II in Debian... :-)

Cheers,
	Giulio