Richard, It has come to the attention of debian-legal that the aspell-en package is licensed under questionable terms. In particular, aspell-en uses the "DEC Word List," which contains the following notice:
(NON-)COPYRIGHT STATUS To the best of my knowledge, all the files I used to build these wordlists were available for public distribution and use, at least for non-commercial purposes. I have confirmed this assumption with the authors of the lists, whenever they were known. Therefore, it is safe to assume that the wordlists in this package can also be freely copied, distributed, modified, and used for personal, educational, and research purposes. (Use of these files in commercial products may require written permission from DEC and/or the authors of the original lists.) ... Naturally, this violates the following clause of the Debian Free Software Guidelines: No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research. The GNU/Aspell maintainer, Kevin Atkinson, has stated that you reviewed and accepted this license as suitable for use with the GNU/Aspell project. On behalf of debian-legal, I would like to ask if you could clarify your position regarding the terms of the aspell-en license, and in particular, the DEC Word List "license". Debian's current stance was nicely summarized by Jeff Licquia in this message: http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200211/msg00041.html Thank you for your time, Brian -- People said I was dumb, but I proved them!
