License change, time to package it up

Bug #284750 reported by Andrew Fenn
34
This bug affects 4 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
nvidia-cg-toolkit (Debian)
Fix Released
Unknown
nvidia-cg-toolkit (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Wishlist
Unassigned
Nominated for Karmic by Andrew Fenn

Bug Description

Binary package hint: nvidia-cg-toolkit

There is already an nvidia-cg-toolkit package which installs the 2004 files directly from Nvidia's website but this package should be made obsolete. At the time this package needed to be downloaded directly from Nivida's website due to copyright issues but this is no longer the case.

If one downloads the tgz for Linux ( on this page: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cg_toolkit.html#downloads ) there are multiple exemptions allowing for Debian to re-distribute the package.

Looking at the .tgz file go to /./usr/local/Cg/docs/license.txt

"2.1.3 Linux Exception. Notwithstanding the foregoing terms of Section
      2.1.1, SOFTWARE designed exclusively for use on the Linux operating
      system may be copied and redistributed, provided that the binary
      files thereof are not modified in any way (except for unzipping of
      compressed files)."

nvidia-cg-toolkit should be packaged and included into Ubuntu as a real package now that the license has changed to allow it. By doing this it will then be possible to build debs that suggest or require it such as Ogre3D and Funguloids that current have it disabled but don't run as well as they could do.

I have already built a deb for it which is available in my ppa: https://launchpad.net/~andrewfenn/+archive

Changed in nvidia-cg-toolkit:
status: Unknown → New
Changed in nvidia-cg-toolkit (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Festor (festor-deactivatedaccount) wrote :
Changed in nvidia-cg-toolkit (Debian):
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Growlf (growlf) wrote :

This also affects the Disney game engine known as Panda3D (also in Launchpad)

Revision history for this message
Philip Muškovac (yofel) wrote :

Setting triaged/whishlist as the debian maintainers know of it and will fix it some time (I hope)

Changed in nvidia-cg-toolkit (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
status: Confirmed → Triaged
Revision history for this message
Andrew Fenn (andrewfenn) wrote :

Just an update. The latest version of the nvidia cg toolkit now comes with the following license (attached)

Notes of interest are:

- "Rights and Limitations of Grant. NVIDIA hereby grants Customer the following non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, non-transferable right to use the SOFTWARE, with the following limitations:"

- "Rights. Customer may use, reproduce, distribute, publicly display and publicly perform the SOFTWARE."

- "No Modification. The SOFTWARE may be redistributed providing that distributed Cg compiler and runtime binaries are unmodified, except for decompression and compression."

I believe this should be satisfactory enough for it to be able to enter Debian non-free and propagate its way into Ubuntu.

Revision history for this message
Stefano Rivera (stefanor) wrote :

Launchpad bug auto-closing is currently broken. This bug was fixed in the following upload:

nvidia-cg-toolkit (3.0.0007-0ubuntu1) maverick; urgency=low

  * New upstream release.
    Closes: #506494, #539418. LP: #365229.
  * Use upstream's tarballs as source instead of downloading during postinst,
    as redistribution is now permitted. The package is now non-free.
    Closes: #502457. LP: #284750, #524740, #254084.
  * Switch to source format 3.0 (quilt) to use multiple upstream tarballs.
    Add get-orig-source to fetch tarballs.
  * Use minimal dh rules.
  * Bump standards version to 3.9.1 (no changes needed).
  * Added (simple) watch file.

Changed in nvidia-cg-toolkit (Ubuntu):
status: Triaged → Fix Released
Changed in nvidia-cg-toolkit (Debian):
status: Confirmed → Fix Released
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