Package: sdcc Version: 2.7.0-1 Severity: serious This version of sdcc was uploaded to non-free, but the reasoning given in the changelog appears to be incorrect. Other packages build-depend on sdcc and are thus signficantly impacted by this mistaken move of the package to non-free. I believe that the package belongs in main and should be returned there immediately.
The changelog indicates that it is the license for the assemblers that is in question. I've just spent some time studying the sources, and see that there are four architecture subtrees under the as/ directory. The as/xa51 subtree is copyright Paul Stoffregen and licensed under GPLv2, so no problem there. The other three are drived from the same assembler package that apparently predates sdcc, and carry the copyright of Alan R. Baldwin, with an 'all rights reserved' clause in the sources. That forces us to look elsewhee, and in as/doc/asmlnk.doc, we find that the author makes two assertions. The first is that the programs are placed in the public domain. The second is that permission is granted for non-commercial use. While this pair of assertions may perhaps appear contradictory, and if written today would clearly indicate some confusion on the part of the author, I think we need to realize that these assertions date from 1995, and the use of the code in sdcc has stood unchallenged for a long time. Further, the second assertion does not place any additional restrictions on the first. Therefore, I think we can and should assume as the sdcc authors apparently have that this work was truly in the public domain, and thus is completely legitimate to include in a GPLv2 work. If you disagree, then there are two reasonable courses of action, neither of which involves placing the entire sdcc package in non-free. The first is to attempt to contact the upstream author of the work in question (or ask the sdcc maintainers to do so) to gain an explicit assertion that his work is ok to include in a GPL'ed work with no additional restrictions. The second would be to split the package into 'sdcc' and 'sdcc-nonfree', placing the affected assemblers in the latter but leaving the compiler and xa51 assembler available in main. I see some mention in the changelog of adding html documentation again with the move to non-free, but see nothing to indicate what the problem is/was. I don't see any immediate problems in a quick read-through of the documentation sources? Bdale -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
