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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=470173
--- Comment #7 from Conrad Meyer konrad@tylerc.org 2008-11-10 03:39:03 EDT --- (In reply to comment #6)
Note that if we only trust the code and docs in the tarball, the license is GPL+ as far as I can tell. If we additionally consult the web site, its GPLv2+. Unfortunately we have to be precise here. Ultimately, clarification from upstream is the best step. An email from them is sufficient; a fixed tarball is ideal but not necessary. Otherwise we'll wait to see what the legal folks have to say.
Is an email from them much better than the front page of their website proclaiming GPLv2+? I've sent the maintainer an email about it anyways and await a reply.
The new package builds fine; rpmlint spews a no-documentation complaint about the -static package but that's nothing to worry about.
About the library versioning thing, my concern is that something built against this package will end up needing -devel installed at runtime because the linker won't understand the different versioning convention and will end up with a dependency on libm4ri.so instead of libm4ri-0.0.20081029.so. This should be relatively easy to verify if you have some software which uses this library around to check.
Sorry, I don't have any software around using this library. The goal is to eventually get Sage itself packaged properly, and this is one of the subprojects it encompasses.