On 2026-04-04 20:01 +0200, Jonathan Bergh wrote:
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".
As others have explained, without specifying an explicit licence that allows at least redistribution the software is not suitable for Debian. But they guy clearly does want others to be able to use the software, "The design system is freely available to all", so it would be worth contacting him to explain that for us to make it easily available in Debian, or for anyone else to do similar for other systems, or to allow it to be publically maintained and maybe even improved, in perpetuity, it would be very helpful if he specificed a licence of some sort, preferably a free software one. This may actually be what he wants - he just hasn't expressed it in the right way from a legal POV. Or maybe he wants to retain complete control and just offer up freeware releases from time to time, we can't tell without asking. It would be a service to the software world to get a clarification of what he actually wants, in either the free, or non-free directions. Wookey -- Principal hats: Wookware, Debian http://wookware.org/ Matrix: @wookey:matrix.org
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