[Magic-dev] Magic: Licensing and embedding readline libraries

[Aanjhan R]

Dear Tim,

On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 8:46 PM, R. Timothy Edwards
<tim at opencircuitdesign.com> wrote:
>  Any mention of GPL in the Fedora package must be in error.  I have
>  never been able to tell exactly what license Magic falls under, but
>  I would assume it to be a BSD license.

Again here we have the question of whether it is the "Original BSD"
License or "modified BSD" license. Because according to
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html the original BSD
license is *not* compatible with GPL but the modified one is. If MAGIC
was licensed under Modified BSD (or rather 3 clause BSD License) then
there should not be any issue with the Debian based distros including
them as it is. Else since  a source copy of GNU Readline is embedded
in the upstream tarball which is licensed under GPL and the actual src
of the package (if licensed under "Original BSD") becomes
incompatible. The only way out is to hack in getting the package use
libreadline of the distro or some such.

Personally I want to get these valuable packages into Debian based
distros without getting into too much of all these, but sometimes one
has to respect the policies of the Distribution as well. Hope you
understand and not take it the wrong way.

I will try my level best to sort things out. Thanks Tim for the
clarity you offered. I am still wondering how Fedora resolved this
license conflict.

Thanks and Regards,
Aanjhan