On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 7:24 AM, <o...@arcticnet.no> wrote:
> It seems that the license header of simgear/screen/texture.{cxx,hxx}
> does not have the same LGPL header as the rest of the sources. In fact,
> it says that the code is "freely distributable", but not freely
> modifiable. Is this file really under an Open Source license? Could you
> clarify (at least for the sake of the license pedants here at Debian,
> who won't accept my packages without settling this)?
I am not a lawyer, but let me try to parse the license:
/*
* \file texture.hxx
* Texture manipulation routines
*
* Copyright (c) Mark J. Kilgard, 1997.
* Code added in april 2003 by Erik Hofman
*
* This program is freely distributable without licensing fees
* and is provided without guarantee or warrantee expressed or
* implied. This program is -not- in the public domain.
*/
I see two statements:
1. "This program is not in the public domain." I don't see a problem here,
none of our [L]GPL code is in the public domain either.
2. "This program is freely distributable without licensing fees and is
provided without guarantee or warrantee expressed or implied." This first
statement seems to say we are free to distribute the code.
I don't see any thing in the license terms that states we cannot modify the
code. Are we running on the assumption that we can only do what is
expressly allowed? Perhaps Erik Hofman should address this. As I look at
the code I see it's a full C++ class. But I'm pretty sure what Mark
original wrote was a C language rgb texture loader, and not the full C++
class that we have now. I suspect that Erik must have started with Mark
Kilgard's rgb texture loader and developed a full class around that and then
simply left Mark's original license terms at the top.
If Fred is correct that this is no longer used within flightgear, then
perhaps the simplest thing to do is to remove it ... or move it off into
some archival area if we think we might want to use the code in the future.
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson: http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/
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