[Trisquel-devel] License of mt19937db.c

[Sam Geeraerts]

Hi guys,

I'm catching up on gNewSense bugs and I'm now looking at the Mersenne
Twister bug [1] again. At the time it was found to be under the
Artistic License. At Rubén's request the copyright holders relicensed
it to GPL [2].

At what I think is the current homepage of the implementation [3] I
found old GPL versions [4]. The "newest version of original
authors" [5] is licensed under the Modified BSD license.

File crypto/mersenne/mt19937db.c in Trisquel's db4.8 looks like it's
still the one from the upstream Berkeley DB project, carrying the
Artistic License notice. The recommended fix in the NONFSDG list [6]
says to either remove the package or use a GPL version of the file. So
far, gNewSense and Trisquel have done neither.

What do you see as a solution, considering that packages like
exim4-base depend on db and replacing the file means reintegrating it
without looking too hard at the current file in db?

[1] https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/index.php?29840
[2]
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2010-05/msg00000.html
[3] http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~m-mat/MT/emt.html
[4]
http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~m-mat/MT/VERSIONS/C-LANG/ver980409.html
[5]
http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~m-mat/MT/VERSIONS/C-LANG/c-lang.html
[6] http://libreplanet.org/wiki/NONFSDG#Oracle_Berkeley_DB

Regards,
Sam Geeraerts
gNewSense