License of the contrib plugins

Hi,

I am the current maintainer of the Debian package of pyblosxom.  I
took over the package fairly recently and among the outstanding bugs
is a request to update the package to the newest version (the current
version in both the unstable and testing repositories is 1.0).

Since I'm both new as the maintainer and the contributed plugins were
recently split out in its own package, I decided to investigate the
new tarball to see if there's any problems with it.  Unfortunately,
there is, as many of the plugins are inappropriately (or
insufficiently) licensed or not licensed at all.  Plugins lacking a
license are not distributable at all (except by the author of the
plugin), so while I'm mostly worried about this in the context of
Debian, pyblosxom itself may be affected too.

The problematic plugins and scripts are:

Completely lacking any kind of license information:
- weblog-add.py
- mt2blosxom.py
- editfile.py
- autoping.py
- xmlrpc_plugins/*
- plugins/*.py (except w3cdate.py, see below)
- plugins/preformatters/*
- plugins/lucene/bin/LucenseSearch.java
- plugins/lucene/lucene.py
- plugins/comments/plugins/*.py
- entryparsers/*

Insufficiently licensed:

- 404_handler.py (Just says __license__ = 'Python', but it needs to be
                 more express)
- plugins/w3cdate.py (As above)

Ok:
- plugins/lucene/bin/BlosxomIndexer.java

As removing all the unlicensed plugins would render the contributed
plugins very useless, I think contacting the authors and asking them
to license the files appropriately might be a good thing to do.  Most
of the files seem to contain contact information and I don't think
getting permission to distribute the files under the GPL, BSD or
Python license (at the author's discretion, obviously) should be too
hard.

Does anybody have any comments before I start tracking down the
authors and get patches so we can hopefully have a up-to-date version
of pyblosxom in sarge, which is soon to be released?

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen                                                        ,''`.
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are      : :' :
                                                                      `. `' 
                                                                        `-  


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