On Sat, 11 Oct 2014, Hendrik Weimer wrote:
I've come across a piece of software that has a requirement in its
license text mandating to cite a certain set of works in scientific
publications for which the software has been used.
I vaguely remember that such citation requirement clauses were generally
considered to be non-free (see, e.g., [1]), but I have trouble to come
up with a reason for this assessment.
Such a requirement is a restriction on use, because it requires you to
cite the software when you use it, even if the manner in which you are
using it is incompatible with citation.
For example, a newspaper article which doesn't use citations, etc.
Can works with a citation requirement go into main? If you're interested
in the specific case, the actual license text is available at [2].
Heh. In this case, it can trivially be made free. GPL v3 allows
licensees to remove additional restrictions when the work is conveyed to
them, and the requirement to cite is clearly an additional restriction
which is not allowed under GPL3 ยง7.
I would contact the openmps group, and explain to them that they should
just make their citation requirement a suggestion. [Any scientific paper
or work is going to cite them anyway, so there's no need to require it.]
[2] http://sourceforge.net/p/openmps/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/gpl3-cite.txt
--
Don Armstrong http://www.donarmstrong.com
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