On 14 Nov, Benjamin Scott wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Nov 2000, Stephen Ryan wrote:
>> Huhwhat? Seyon is GPL, and has been for a year and a half.
>
> Well, every source package I could find for it said explicitly otherwise.
Part of the copyright file I quoted actually has the older license in
it, which forbids distributing modified files, as you noted, and which
violates one of the criteria for being open source. The README file
still has the older license listed in it also (sounds like a bug in the
documentation to me).
>> From the 'copyright' file included in Debian's seyon package (verbatim,
>> including typos):
>
> Ummm... that's interesting. Is there some place I can download an updated
> source package for it?
>
>> ... this one has a faint odor of FUD around it.
>
> Probably does at that. I certainly have (or at least had) some doubt over
> the license for Seyon, and was uncertain how Debian could get away with
> distributing it.
>
Aha! My apologies - finding information about seyon appears to be
hard, whereas finding outdated information about seyon appears to be
easy. I did a little searching around and found that many of the seyon
source archives out there are out of date. The current version seems to
be 2.20, but many of the things I found with a cursory search were
version 2.14. In particular, a cursory check of Google for seyon and
rpm found only version 2.14.
So I searched Debian's web site for seyon, and found the following page,
http://packages.debian.org/stable/comm/seyon.html, which includes a link
to download the original source package (and the revised copyright
file, separately).
The freshmeat record for seyon includes two download pages, one of
which is listed as the primary download site and the other is listed as
an alternate - HOWEVER, the primary site only has up to version 2.14,
which is before the GPL license switch, while the alternate download
site has 2.20, which came after the license change.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/seyon/?highlight=seyon is the freshmeat
appindex record and
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/apps/serialcomm/dialout/ is the
"alternate" download site, which has the more recent version of the
source. The freshmeat record does indicate that it is under the GPL,
though I think you'd be hard pressed to verify that from the "primary"
download site.
--
Stephen Ryan Debian GNU/Linux
Technology Coordinator
Center for Educational Outcomes,
C. Everett Koop Institute at Dartmouth College
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