What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted May 30, 2017 17:28 UTC (Tue) by leephillips (subscriber, #100450)
In reply to: What's new in gnuplot 5.2 by dvrabel
Parent article: What's new in gnuplot 5.2

The license is linked to in the introductory article that this article links to. Gnuplot, including v. 5¹, is available as a Debian package. I admit I'm not an expert on all the minutiae relating to the various subtle shades of software freedom, but, as a rough guide, if it's in the main Debian distribution I call it free enough.

¹https://packages.debian.org/sid/gnuplot

What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted May 30, 2017 17:53 UTC (Tue) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613) [Link] (10 responses)

> Gnuplot, including v. 5¹, is available as a Debian package. I admit I'm not an expert on all the minutiae relating to the various subtle shades of software freedom, but, as a rough guide, if it's in the main Debian distribution I call it free enough.

If you look closely, you see that they have repackage the source with a "+dfsg" version suffix. That means that the Debian maintainer had to remove something non-free in order for the the free parts of the package to be included in Debian.

So by your own standards, gnuplot is *not* "free enough", though apparently a useful subset of gnuplot is.

What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted May 30, 2017 18:49 UTC (Tue) by leephillips (subscriber, #100450) [Link] (7 responses)

Your comment inspired me to look even more closely. The files that had to be removed are some example scripts, included as files in the "demo" directory, that bear a copyright notice. They were contributed by a third party who attached a copyright notice to them, years ago. The actual gnuplot program is free software, according to the FSF¹. Its license is incompatible with the GPL, but that doesn't mean it's not free.

”So by your own standards, gnuplot is *not* "free enough”

That would be denying the antecedent.²

¹https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html
²http://www.fallacyfiles.org/denyante.html

What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted May 30, 2017 19:25 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (6 responses)

I think this is incorrect.

See http://gnuplot.cvs.sourceforge.net/gnuplot/gnuplot/Copyri...

It says quite clearly:

> Permission to modify the software is granted, but not the right to
> distribute the complete modified source code.

That seems to violate the "four freedoms" definition of free software, specifically "Freedom 3", the right to distribute copies of your modified version to others.

A subset of gnuplot is still effectively under the GPL, because it originally was licensed as such, so it's possible that Debian is distributing that subset, or it's possible that the Debian maintainer made a mistake.

What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted May 30, 2017 19:29 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (5 responses)

Self-correction, the gnuplot license follows with:

> Modifications are to be distributed as patches to the released version.

I suppose this preserves all freedoms, just not with convenience.

What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted May 30, 2017 19:46 UTC (Tue) by leephillips (subscriber, #100450) [Link] (2 responses)

"I suppose this preserves all freedoms, just not with convenience."

I suppose it does, at least in the opinion of the FSF (see my link above). Note also that the FSF used to actually distribute gnuplot.

"A subset of gnuplot is still effectively under the GPL, because it originally was licensed as such"

This doesn't sound likely. The first version of the GPL was disseminated in 1989¹. Gnuplot was publicly released in 1986 (as far as I can tell).

¹https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copying-1.0.html

What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted May 30, 2017 20:47 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Sure enough. I misinterpreted the scenario of "gnuplot is not distributed as a whole under the GPL" or similar, combined with the current copyright file comments in the faq.

It seems that the GPL components are recent dual-licensed additions (for some values of recent.)

What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted May 30, 2017 20:51 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

For anyone interested, this is far more authoritative than any of the thread so far, or at least more authoritative than my guesswork.

https://lwn.net/Articles/486466/

What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted May 31, 2017 1:53 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

FYI, the DFSG have a clause that was specifically designed for these kind of licenses:

https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted Jun 1, 2017 2:20 UTC (Thu) by rav (guest, #89256) [Link]

Luckily you can just release your modifications using a distributed source code control system such as Git which makes it easy* to view and work with the officially released version alongside the patches.

What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted May 30, 2017 19:51 UTC (Tue) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (1 responses)

I think you are over-interpreting the +dfsg tag. From the DebianMentorsFaq:

What does “dfsg” in the version string mean? “+dfsg.N” is a conventional way of extending a version string, when the Debian package's upstream source tarball is actually different from the source released upstream.

There are currently 7 Debian-specific patches in the Alioth git repository for packaging gnuplot. Only two of these affect the actual source code (one removes inclusion of an "Author" tag in generated PDF files, the other changes the default time format for I don't know what reason). The remaining patches tweak the configuration files to play nicely with Debian's build system.

If you have specific licensing concerns that are fixable, please contact me off-line and we can try to address them.

What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted May 31, 2017 12:20 UTC (Wed) by dvrabel (subscriber, #9500) [Link]

Clarifying that pseudonyms and email addresses satisfy clause 3 would be sufficient.