[Bug 167253] Review Request: CERN library and associated binaries

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Summary: Review Request: CERN library and associated binaries


https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=167253





------- Additional Comments From alfredo.ferrari at cern.ch  2005-11-23 04:47 EST -------
Hi
somebody pointed me at this package claiming that it distributes some parts of
FLUKA included in GEANT321 without authorization and under an improper license.
Indeed this is the case: several routines and include files are present. The
FLUKA parts included in GEANT321 were never released under GPL/LGPL/BSD or
similar, neither licensed to be freely redistributed.
Their intellectual property originally belong to INFN (the Italian Institute for
Nuclear and Particle Physics) and when CERNLIB was relicensed under GPL it did
not include (obviously) those parts contributed by other Institutions under
different conditions.
In particular, from http://cernlib.web.cern.ch/cernlib/conditions.html

"(C) Copyright CERN except where explicitly stated otherwise. Permission to use
and/or redistribute this work is granted under the terms of the GNU General
Public License. FLUKA routines included in GEANT3 are joint copyright of INFN
and CERN and are not licensed under the GPL: permission to use and/or
redistribute outside GEANT3 should be negotiated. The software and documentation
made available under the terms of this license are provided with no warranty."

The same statement is reported in the copyright file included in your packaged
CERNLIB, together with the statement that the relevant FLUKA files have been
excised out of Debian distribution. It could be a qui-pro-quo about which files
belong to FLUKA, since part of them was in the "fluka" directory and part in the
"peanut" directory, in particular the routines:

fdevap fdnopt fdpree flkdt1 flkdt2 flkdt3 flkdt4 flkdt5 flkdt6 flkdt7
bimsel cosleg fekfnc fpfrnc fradnc frhinc frhonc nclvin nclvst nucnuc 
nwisel peanut pfnclv phdset phdwll pioabs prepre rstsel sbcomp sigfer 
umofin xinneu xinpro

and the include files: 

aadat.inc auxpar.inc balanc.inc bamjcm.inc cmsres.inc comcon.inc corinc.inc
corinc.inc dblprc.inc decayc.inc decayc2.inc depnuc.inc dimpar.inc eva0.inc
eva1.inc fheavy.inc finlsp.inc finlsp2.inc finlsp3.inc finpar.inc
finpar2.inc finuc.inc finuc2.inc finuct.inc hadflg.inc hadpar.inc
higfis.inc inpdat.inc inpdat2.inc inpflg.inc iounit.inc isotop.inc
labcos.inc mapa.inc metlsp.inc nucdat.inc nucgeo.inc nuclev.inc nucpar.inc
paprop.inc parevt.inc parnuc.inc part.inc part2.inc part3.inc reac.inc
redver.inc resnuc.inc split.inc xsepar.inc

are part of FLUKA and subject to the FLUKA license. I could have well missed
other files.

Since several years FLUKA is a standalone joint INFN-CERN project with a
specific license (see http://www.fluka.org for details) and those parts included
in GEANT321 have been obsoleted as early as 1996. The Debian CERNLIB maintainer
contacted me, as main author, after he noted the different conditions for FLUKA,
 and then he decided not to include those parts in their packages since their
are incompatible with the GPL or similar.

I assume you are not interested in distributing files GPL-incompatible, and
anyway the FLUKA authors are reluctant to let such old stuff go around.

               Best regards
              Alfredo Ferrari




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