On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 01:54:18PM +0100, Eike Dehling wrote: > " Spin is distributed in source form to encourage research in formal > verification, and to help a support friendly and open exchange of > algorithms, ideas, and tools. The software itself has a copyright from > Lucent Technologies and Bell Laboratories, and is distributed for > research and educational purposes only (i.e., no guarantee of any kind > is implied by the distribution of the code, and all rights are reserved > by the copyright holder). For this general use of Spin, no license is > required.
"All rights are reserved by the copyright holder" fails to give permission to redistribute, let alone modify. > So unless someone uses it commercially no license applies. Debian itself No licence means no right to redistribute. Copyright defaults to "thou shalt not", and then a copyright holder may grant further rights to the work as he/she sees fit, either unilaterally (in, for example, the case of a free software licence) or in return from some consideration by another party. > isn't commercial, so it doesn't apply here. The first sentence even > encourages redistribution/modification, i'd think? How much of a problem > is the restriction on commercial use, when non-commercial use is free? Is what was quoted above the sum total of the "permission text" that comes with spin? I don't see anything in what you quoted above which gives the right to modify and/or redistribute spin. It says "Spin is distributed in source form to encourage research in formal verification, and to help support a friendly and open exchange of algorithms, ideas, and tools." That sounds more to me like "we're giving you source to this so you can see how we did it, which might help you in your endeavours". It says nothing about modifying the source code to produce an improved version. - Matt
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