On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 4:48 AM, Horst Meyerdierks <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi Ole,
>
> You must feel a bit alone on this list. Comiserations. I'm not
> sure whether the following makes the bigger picture clearer
> to the Starlink developers, but here goes...
>
> 1. Debian
>
>
> In Debian there is a bit of a culture of integrating useful things
> into the Debian release. Examples Starlinkers will be familiar
> with are pgplot and cfitsio.
>

Isn't PGPLOT a strange example here because it seems to have a very
restrictive licence making it impossible for anyone to distribute the
source code? I've seen many discussions of people getting upset that
they have patches for pgplot but nowhere to send them. Starlink had a
special deal with Caltech to allow redistribution of pgplot but I'm
now confused to hear that pgplot is in debian.


> However, these things to not become things that Debian does. If
> the original, upstream, developers stop supporting the software,
> Debian will probably drop it from its release.
>
> That makes sense, because the good stuff made upstream should
> be integrated into several major Linux distros, not just Debian.
>
> This makes it difficult for Ole. What he needs is GPL source for
> all that makes ds9 work. If that means he has to change ds9,
> those changes should be acceptable to the upstream developers of
> ds9. So he's caught between Starlink and SAO.
>

I don't understand why you think he's caught anywhere. I've spent
years trying to get the Starlink software switched over to GPL. We
have permission for all the SERC/PPARC/STFC code to be GPL but it's
the "submitted by some astronomer at a university" code that is a bit
problematic. I actually want all the software to be GPL and especially
AST. The whole point of this discussion is to work out how we get this
done. I don't think anyone is objecting to the concept of making AST
compliant I'm just wondering how it's going to be possible in the
short term.

As an aside, AST contains code from wcstools as well but that is
heavily modified so we can't just link against wcstools.


> If the Starlink collection contains items that are not GPL, are
> there any GPL items that fall foul of case 1?
>

The idea is meant to be that all the libraries are GPL. I can then at
least worry about the applications at a later date.

-- 
Tim Jenness

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