License conditions for a specific file in praat

Rafael Laboissière <[email protected]> Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:36:58 +0100
Newsgroups gmane.linux.debian.devel.legal
Organization Debian GNU/Linux
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi,

I have a question about the license conditions of a specific file in 
the praat package, namely external/lame/fft.c [1]. It contains the 
header below, and I am wondering how it should be mentioned in 
debian/copyright.

   /*
   ** FFT and FHT routines
   **  Copyright 1988, 1993; Ron Mayer
   **      Copyright (c) 1999-2000 Takehiro Tominaga
   **
   **  fht(fz,n);
   **      Does a hartley transform of "n" points in the array "fz".
   **
   ** NOTE: This routine uses at least 2 patented algorithms, and may be
   **       under the restrictions of a bunch of different organizations.
   **       Although I wrote it completely myself; it is kind of a derivative
   **       of a routine I once authored and released under the GPL, so it
   **       may fall under the free software foundation's restrictions;
   **       it was worked on as a Stanford Univ project, so they claim
   **       some rights to it; it was further optimized at work here, so
   **       I think this company claims parts of it.  The patents are
   **       held by R. Bracewell (the FHT algorithm) and O. Buneman (the
   **       trig generator), both at Stanford Univ.
   **       If it were up to me, I'd say go do whatever you want with it;
   **       but it would be polite to give credit to the following people
   **       if you use this anywhere:
   **           Euler     - probable inventor of the fourier transform.
   **           Gauss     - probable inventor of the FFT.
   **           Hartley   - probable inventor of the hartley transform.
   **           Buneman   - for a really cool trig generator
   **           Mayer(me) - for authoring this particular version and
   **                       including all the optimizations in one package.
   **       Thanks,
   **       Ron Mayer; [email protected]
   ** and added some optimization by
   **           Mather    - idea of using lookup table
   **           Takehiro  - some dirty hack for speed up
   */

Please Cc me on any replies, as I am not subscribed to debian-legal.

Best,

Rafael Laboissière

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/praat/-/blob/master/external/lame/fft.c?ref_type=heads