On 13 April 2014 14:46, Tino Didriksen <[email protected]> wrote:
tl;dr: this clause is fine: it's not an advertising clause, it's merely a requirement to reproduce a copyright notice (all truly open source licences have equivalent, though better written, clauses). The licence is not fine, though: per section 2, the terms can be changed without notice, meaning all rights can be revoked. Not open, needs to be removed from SVN swiftly. > I noticed this checkin today from v21 (virasj): > https://svn.code.sf.net/p/apertium/svn/incubator/apertium-tha-eng/LICENSE-LEXITRON > > It includes an old-fashioned advertisement clause: >> >> (c)Any product, created and redistributed by you, which is composed of any >> part from LEXiTRON must include the following acknowledgement: "This >> product is created by the adaptation of LEXiTRON developed by NECTEC >> (http://www.nectec.or.th/)." > > > Is that compatible with Apertium? > IANAL, TINLA. That said: This is not an advertising clause -- the old (4-clause) BSD licence required any advertising materials that made mention of a feature derived from the BSD software to carry a notice: if your implementation for the frobnitz feature came from BSD, if you mention frobnitz in your adverts, then you must include the acknowledgement in the advert. This is not that: it requires nothing more than an acknowledgement on a derived work. This is similar to the MIT licence's clause that states 'The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.' In Apertium terms, this clause means that there must be an acknowledgement in the language pair's README -- a comment in the dictionary is insufficient. > It isn't quite as bad as the old-style BSD clause, in that it doesn't > require the message to be reproduced when the program is run, The BSD licences never had such a requirement. The GPL, on the other hand, does -- if the program runs interactively, it is required to print a notice stating that there is no warrantee. > but I can't > quite see how one can include such a message in the finished compiled pair > in a way that anyone would ever notice, which is clearly against the spirit > of that clause. The conditions for redistribution in binary form are covered in section 3 (b). This, section 3 (c) is clearly meant to be a catch-all for other, unforeseen, derivatives, such as in paper form, or source distributions including it. Including the licence file would be sufficient to fulfill section 3 (c) for the source package, and 3 (b) for the binary. All that said, it is a terrible licence. I'm willing to bet it was never even seen by a copyright lawyer. The real problems in this licence lie elsewhere: 2. Acceptance of License Agreement NECTEC reserves the right to update the license agreement at any time without prior notice. IOW, the licence can be revoked at any moment, without notice. A licence that's maybe a little open, for now, if nothing changes, is not open source. This cannot be used in Apertium, and having it in SVN puts us in breach of Sourceforge's terms of usage. 3 (e)You must not use "LEXiTRON" in a manner likely to cause any damage to NECTEC or third person. NECTEC shall reserve our rights to demand any compensation, retaining fee, costs of action and execution, and expenses occured out of such manner. Aside from being basically idiotic, this could run foul of section 6 of the Open Source Definition ("No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor"), depending on what they mean by "damage". Which is not at all clear. -- <Sefam> Are any of the mentors around? <jimregan> yes, they're the ones trolling you ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book "Graph Databases" is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, this first edition is now available. Download your free book today! http://p.sf.net/sfu/NeoTech _______________________________________________ Apertium-stuff mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/apertium-stuff
