Re: Re: opencascade license in squeeze
On Sat, 2010-03-06 at 10:53 +0900, Charles Plessy wrote: Le Fri, Mar 05, 2010 at 08:09:45PM -0500, Adam C Powell IV a écrit : * The statement that the copyright license is not a trademark license is not in conflict with the GPL, and explicitly stated as an option in GPL-3. I don't think anyone believes GPL-3 is incompatible with GPL-2... Dear Adam, I have not followed the issue so I can not help you to solve it, however I just would like to correct one thing that you wrote above: the GPLs version 2 and 3 are incompatible. You can find more detailed explanations on the FSF website: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#v2v3Compatibility D'oh! Forgot about that. I was thinking some of the patent clauses might break compatibility, I guess there are multiple v3 restrictions which do so... But the criterion remains: an incompatible license is one which imposes additional restrictions beyond the GPL. That's regardless of whether a license claims to be compatible or not. Have a nice week-end, Thanks, you too! -Adam -- GPG fingerprint: D54D 1AEE B11C CE9B A02B C5DD 526F 01E8 564E E4B6 Engineering consulting with open source tools http://www.opennovation.com/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: Re: opencascade license in squeeze
Hi Francesco, I contacted upstream a number of times a couple of years ago, and never got any reply. That said, a couple of people convinced me that OCTPL is (now) GPL-compatible, so FreeCAD is distributable, based on the following points: * The clause indicating You are also obliged to send your modifications of the original source code (if you've made any) to the Initial Developer, which was in OCTPL 6.2, is gone from OCTPL 6.3.0. The license on opencascade.org is wrong, see the LICENSE file in the distribution, where the introductory language containing the above clause has been removed. * The statement that the copyright license is not a trademark license is not in conflict with the GPL, and explicitly stated as an option in GPL-3. I don't think anyone believes GPL-3 is incompatible with GPL-2... * There are other copyleft licenses which are GPL-compatible but do not include explicit GPL-compatibility clauses. (And there are probably copyleft licenses which claim to be GPL-compatible in their clauses but aren't.) The basic requirement is that the license not add additional restrictions beyond the GPL. LGPL licensing of OpenCASCADE would clear this up once and for all. But on the other hand, as one debian-legal poster mentioned (sorry, can't find the reference just now), the trademark clause clarifies the (lack of) trademark rights on derivatives more than other licenses (such as Firefox, which has a separate trademark policy). Whether that makes it a good license worth using is debatable, but it's doubtful upstream will walk away from it. That said, I'm going to contact a couple of people and see if there is a potential for LGPL licensing... Sorry these points have not been aired in a public forum before. I'm not subscribed to debian-legal, and only recently became aware of these posts (thanks Francesco!), so I didn't know that people were raising an issue of this. [As a result of not being subscribed, please CC me in replies.] -Adam -- GPG fingerprint: D54D 1AEE B11C CE9B A02B C5DD 526F 01E8 564E E4B6 Engineering consulting with open source tools http://www.opennovation.com/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: Re: opencascade license in squeeze
Le Fri, Mar 05, 2010 at 08:09:45PM -0500, Adam C Powell IV a écrit : * The statement that the copyright license is not a trademark license is not in conflict with the GPL, and explicitly stated as an option in GPL-3. I don't think anyone believes GPL-3 is incompatible with GPL-2... Dear Adam, I have not followed the issue so I can not help you to solve it, however I just would like to correct one thing that you wrote above: the GPLs version 2 and 3 are incompatible. You can find more detailed explanations on the FSF website: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#v2v3Compatibility Have a nice week-end, -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100306015340.gc12...@kunpuu.plessy.org