Octave-forge and legal issues

[Quentin Spencer]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:

>On Mon, 2005-04-25 at 16:56 +0200, Matthias Saou wrote:
>  
>
>>Quentin Spencer wrote :
>>    
>>
>>>2. Create a modified source tarball with the offending code removed. 
>>>This would be easy, but the source wouldn't match the upstream source.
>>>      
>>>
>>This has already been done for some packages (e.g. xmms, gstreamer-
>>plugins), and AFAIK is acceptable.
>>    
>>
>... unless the sources are GPL'ed. Not shipping the original sources
>would violate the GPL.
>
>octave-forge's spec claims the package to be gpl'ed, but a closer look
>reveals it not be entirely GPL'ed, but to be a collection of sources
>carrying different licenses.
>
>So, removing the offending sources legally probably would be OK.
>  
>
Yes, I erroneously assumed that it was GPL. Many of the functions are 
GPL, but not all, and the license distributed with the sources in fact 
says the collection is licensed as public domain. The updated spec file 
now shows this, and I'll soon create a modified tarball that should 
remove all incompatible source files.