Hi fenn,
> Recently a talented programmer who had written his own real-time
> linux
> based cnc control showed up on the irc channel. When I asked him why
> he
> chose to write his own software instead of contributing to our
> project, he
> replied that, among other things, he was unsure if EMC was fully GPL
> compliant. This bugs me.
This bugs me too. (otoh it's nice that there are OSS alternatives to
emc2).
EMC is not GPL compliant at all. EMC is Public Domain, with additions
by quite a few developers who never said what license they release
their changes under.
Note: EMC refers to the Version 1 of the Enhanced Machine Controller,
developed by NIST and released as PD code.
It is not to be mixed up with emc2 which, although adapted from the
EMC code, is intended to be GPL/LGPL.
And any code commited to it is GPL/LGPL (at least I have never
seen/heard otherwise).
> If anyone knows of any files in the current codebase that aren't GPL
> or
> LGPL licensed, would they please say what they are, so we can do
> something
> about it?
I know of 2 events regarding to licensing problems brought up:
I. an email by Paul Corner (18.05.2006) stating the following issues:
1. "Under the src/hal/drivers directory are a number of files
associated with the
m5i20 driver (including plx9030.h) - Whilst Peter Wallace of Mesa
Electronics
has granted permission to release these files under a GPL, he has not
to my
knowledge, publically transfered copyrights to Peter Vavaroutsos."
I contacted PeteV after that, and he confirmed that licensing is
conform to the work done (his name on the files he wrote).
2. "emc/kinematics/genhexkins.* are by Brian Register".
I tried to contact Brian Register (so did Paul) but we both
failed. Ray Henry stated that Brian was an intern at NIST during the
time he wrote the genhexkins, which makes the work beeing PD.
3. "Finally, emc2/debian/* Take a look at the commit of revision
1.1 for several of the files in this directory -"
It seems Paul debianized emc2 before I started to do so, and I
failed to acknoledge his work. This has been resolved now.
II. an email from Brett Smith - Licensing Compliance Engineer, Free
Software Foundation notifying of some licensing problems:
"It appears that some of the comments in your source files refer
to the "version 2.1 of the GNU General Public License."
this was indeed correct, and due to a bad copy/paste. The issue
has been resolved.
> Also, I'd like to ask the board to come up with a time period
> for comments, after which we can safely claim that the EMC project
> has
> finally "made the transition to GPL" that we've all been waiting
> for. If
> anyone is certain that EMC is completely free of any code with a
> questionable license, please stand up and say so, and we can get
> this over
> with much quicker.
We can safely claim that now (if we refer to emc2, not the original
EMC).
I see no reasons to have any doubts about licensing problems in emc2.
> Once we've agreed that there are no lurking hidden problems, it
> would be
> nice to inform the user base what the fuss was all about in the
> first
> place. I for one don't know. If EMC is free and unencumbered it is
> something to be proud of; an announcement to this effect can do no
> harm
> and will correct some misconceptions that might be preventing people
> from
> using or contributing to the project.
Honestly, I have no clue what the fuss is all about.
It seems there are some individuals once in a while that find it
interesting to spread FUD,
and try to discredit OSS projects. I have no idea how this benefits
them, or what personal urge is driving them.
> Thanks,
> -fenn
Best regards,
Alex Joni
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