Re: ham radio files missing

On Mon, 18 Apr 2005 Joerg Reuter wrote:
>
> Hmm, IIRC Xastir has a licence issue...
>
> Ah, yes, found it. rotated.c states:
>
> /* xvertext 5.0, Copyright (c) 1993 Alan Richardson
>  * ([email protected])
>   *
>   * Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software
>   * and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is
>   * hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice
>   * appear in all copies and that both the copyright notice and
>   * this permission notice appear in supporting documentation.


> IMHO (however, IANAL) this is is incompatible to the GPL ("without
> fee" collides with section 6 of the GPL: "You may not impose any
> further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights
> granted herein.")
>
> Thus I feel reluctant to package Xastir, despite Xastir being an
> excellent program...

I emailed Joerg directly regarding this issue after someone sent me
a link to this message (I wasn't subscribed to this list at the
time).  The Xastir development team has been wondering why a _very_
old Xastir version was included in SuSE for many years, and why
Xastir was dropped from the distribution recently.

The above copyright notice _is_ compatible with the GPL.  A few
Google searches using some of the wording contained in the above
text will prove that out.  I sent relevant links to Joerg, but since
he's doing the ham stuff in his spare time it might be a while
before he takes a look at it.

There were some install directory changes some time back which make
upgrades from the old versions more difficult.  Please, if
distributing Xastir with _any_ distribution, choose one of the
latest 1.4.2 development snapshots:  They are very stable and have
some particularly good bug-fixes in them.

I often recommend SuSE to new Xastir users as it's the distribution
I tend to use most and what I do Xastir development on.  It's a
shame SuSE doesn't distribute Xastir at this point.

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
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