Packaging Starplot and related data files

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On Mon, 2007-11-12 at 11:43 +0530, Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray wrote:
> I am packaging Starplot (http://starplot.org/) for Fedora and would
> like to discuss some license related issues.
> 
> The main Starplot program that gets built from
> http://starplot.org/downloads/starplot-0.95.4.tar.gz is licensed under
> GPLv2+. However, the Starplot data files distributed as
> datahttp://starplot.org/data/gliese3-0.95.tar.gz and
> http://starplot.org/data/yale5-0.95.tar.gz seem to be under a
> "Redistributable, no modification permitted" license.

<long explanation snipped>

This meets the "Binary Firmware" criteria:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#BinaryFirmware

* The files are non-executable
  * The files are not libraries. 
  * The files are standalone, not embedded in executable or library
    code. 
  * Explicit permission is given by the owner to freely redistribute
    without restrictions (this permission must be included, in
    "writing", with the files in the packaging) 
  * The files must be necessary for the functionality of open source
    code being included in Fedora.

Like you said, the modified .star files can't be distributed, but the
ADC data files are fine to package as is, under the "Redistributable, no
modification permitted". 

Can't say I'm very happy about it, but it meets the criteria. I would
much rather see them work up something similar to the license we
negotiated with the EPSG for their dataset:

http://www.epsg.org/CurrentDB.html#use

~spot