> This may actually be what he wants - he just hasn't expressed it in > the right way from a legal POV.
Yeah for sure, this was my understanding, and what I meant being "I dont believe FOSS is / was his thing". It's a pity because copy-lefting it have been the easy thing to do. > 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. I'll keep my eyes and ears peeled for what he's up to these days, but having looked I can't even find an email address for him these days ... Cheers On Sun, Apr 5, 2026 at 2:56 PM Wookey <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 >
