Oolite Bulletins

Hi all,

I'm looking into packaging Oolite for the Fedora distribution (it currently has rather minimal support for GNUstep, but that is more due to the perceived lack of applications. Enter Oolite into the stage!).

A potential problem is the exact license that the Oolite source and data files use. The website cites GPLv2, but the bundled license file and most data files claim CC-BY-NC-SA, which is not an FSF-approved free license (due to the disallowing of commercial use) and thus not admissible by the Fedora project.

I might be able to get it into the "official" non-official Fedora repository, RPM Fusion, but would like to get it into Fedora proper if possible. Anyone knows who owns the copyright to the core project, is it Giles by himself or do contributors such as Ahruman keep the copyright to their contributions?

PS if the NonCommercial part of the license is not altered, the Debian package of Oolite is potentially violating the Debian Free Software Guidelines as well.

Edit: ah, the SVN version clarifies that the license is GPL (version 2 or later) *and* CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0. Could it be clarified that the exact same license apply to 1.65? It appears to be CC only from the source tarball.

Oh, and another question: when the next Oolite version is out, will the tarballs be split into src and data like 1.65? Trying to decide whether to package them separately (thus a bugfix will not require users to re-download the data package) or as a single RPM package.

Thanks in advance!

Regarding the second question, I believe that the next version tarball will be packaged the same way as it is now, unless there is a special reason that warrants a change. In my opinion, it is better organized having the entire package in one tarball rather than in many smaller ones. Makes version control much easier, too.

hircus wrote:

Edit: ah, the SVN version clarifies that the license is GPL (version 2 or later) *and* CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0.

Even more specifically, the code is GPL v2 or later, and the assets are dual-licensed and may be distributed under either license.

The official license change announcement specifies that 1.65 is now dual-licensed in its entirety and may be distributed under GPL v2 or later.

Ahruman wrote:

The official license change announcement specifies that 1.65 is now dual-licensed in its entirety and may be distributed under GPL v2 or later.

Wonderful, thanks. Now I just have to worry about packaging 1.71.2 (the 1.65 package is done). Fedora already has a SpiderMonkey JS package, but Oolite does not compile against it (complains about C strings having to be UTF-8).