On Sat, Apr 04, 2026 at 08:01:28PM +0200, Jonathan Bergh wrote:
There is a suite of applications which have been released "free download and use" including the source code, which I would like to package.The software is released with the source code by John Denton, formerly of the Whittle Lab at Cambridge, who has not licensed or copyrighted the code (I dont believe FOSS is / was his thing, just releasing the code to the engineering community as a gesture of goodwill upon his retirement). The statement of the software being free can be read on the webpage, and also in the conference paper within which he announced his release of the software as "free for the community to use".What are the rules for this in Debian?
The rules for this in Debian are "if the license matches the DFSG requirements this can go into main". Other things you mentioned aren't really important.
"who has not licensed [...] the code" means the default restrictions apply, which is "fair use only".
The webpage is here: https://sites.google.com/view/multall-turbomachinery-design
If by "The statement of the software being free" you meant "The design system is freely available to all and can be downloaded" written on this page then no it's not even a statement of the software being "free". Software that can be downloaded and used without payment is often called "freeware".
-- WBR, wRAR
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
