Hi David,
Apologies for taking so long to get back to you on this.
Is the following slightly modified version of your press release
acceptable to you?
[corrected the spelling of Michael Sandrof's name, removed the license
itself, did some minor rearrangement of some words to shorten a couple
of sentences, moved references to the end, and added a title. Nothing
important, I hope]
---
Debian GNU/Linux
http://www.debian.org/
IrcII License Issues
June 8, 1998
Michael Sandrof, Troy Rollo, and Matthew Green are putting the ircII code
under a BSD-like license (without the advertising clause), retroactive
to all versions of ircII, past and present. This action is to remove
any doubt as to whether ircII is Open Source.
This change was prompted by the Debian project, which requires all
software in its main distribution to pass the Debian Free Software
Guidelines. Several members of the project noted that the license
was ambiguous in places as to whether modified versions could be
distributed, and an effort was made to contact the past and present
developers of ircII, Michael Sandrof, Troy Rollo and Matthew Green,
in order to clarify the situation. This effort was successful, and the
three agreed to retroactively assign a modified BSD license to the code
to remove any doubt.
The Debian project thanks James Troup and Igor Grobman for pointing out
this problem, David Welton for taking the time to contact and query the
ircII developers about the license, and, most of all, Michael Sandrof,
Troy Rollo and Matthew Green, both for creating such a great piece
of software in the first place, and for taking the time to deal with
this issue.
>> About Debian
Debian GNU/Linux is a free distribution of the Linux operating system.
It is maintained and updated through the work of many users who volunteer
their time and effort.
>> Contact information
For further information, please contact press@debian.org, or visit the
Debian homepage at <http://www.debian.org/>.
Debian's stance on free software is presented in the Social Contract,
which incorporates the Debian Free Software Guidelines. This can be
found at <http://www.debian.org/social_contract.html>. Background
information on free software may be found at the the Free Software
Foundation's web site <http://www.fsf.org/>, or the Open Source home
page <http://www.opensource.org/>.
IrcII is distributed from <ftp://ircii.warped.com/pub/ircII/>. The new
license may be found as:
ftp://ircii.warped.com/pub/ircII/ircii-current/ircii/doc/Copyright
---
If it is, I'm happy to forward this to slashdot, cola, etc.
(Linux News Weekly, http://www.lwn.org/ have already run with the
previous draft, which at a minimum needs a spelling correction on
Michael's name in the first paragraph :)
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.
``It's not a vision, or a fear. It's just a thought.''
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