05-12-2020, 07:09 PM
Hello, I am a Debian Maintainer on the Science Team. I was recently looking into NASTRAN-95 and the package you mentioned. It's a bit of a shame, really, that the package is forced to be in the non-free section and thus not really part of Debian. This means other packages can't depend on it for any features without becoming non-free themselves.
The NASA Open Source Agreement has a clause that says that if you redistribute with patches, the patches must be original authorship, not a set of accumulated patches from multiple authors, such as would be kept for a Linux distribution. This also means if you fix something and it never gets merged upstream, it's a license violation for someone else to distribute NASTRAN with your fix.
It seems like a tall order to try to change to a standard license without this flaw, but unfortunately without such a change it seems like NASTRAN is moribund.
The NASA Open Source Agreement has a clause that says that if you redistribute with patches, the patches must be original authorship, not a set of accumulated patches from multiple authors, such as would be kept for a Linux distribution. This also means if you fix something and it never gets merged upstream, it's a license violation for someone else to distribute NASTRAN with your fix.
It seems like a tall order to try to change to a standard license without this flaw, but unfortunately without such a change it seems like NASTRAN is moribund.