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: Debian package for Elmer - Re: ITP: Elmer -- Finite element software for multiphysics problems
Hello Mikko, And let me thank you and CSC for being a model upstream partner in the effort to make a high-quality Debian package for such a wonderful piece of software. Your responsiveness, openness to patches, and willingness to discuss license issues have all been far above and beyond any other similar organization that I have worked with. On Thu, 2008-11-13 at 23:49 +0200, Mikko Lyly wrote: Hello Adam, First of all, thank you for your effort, it is greatly appreciated. The only two ways to get around this are: * Get the ARPACK people to drop the non-free requirements of their license (see http://bugs.debian.org/491794 ). * Change the license of Elmer either to something like LGPL or to grant an explicit GPL exception to link with ARPACK (and maybe Metis?). Both of these are, of course, beyond the scope of this maintainer... :-( I do understand the problem, but could you please elaborate the Debian point of view? I think we are good wrt the licence of Arpack (we reproduce the copyright notice in the documentaion, at least, as required by Arpack license for binary distributions, as well as for source). Indeed, you're fine as far as your distribution is concerned; as far as I can tell no GPL code in the fem directory written by others which is linked to ARPACK. As the Elmer copyright holder, you just need to abide by the ARPACK license, and can do whatever you want with the Elmer code. But if Debian redistributes it, and the code changes hands, the owner of the Elmer copyright can in theory restrict Debian from distributing it. The reason is that, at least under the FSF and Debian interpretation, linking GPL code with libraries with more restrictions creates a derived work which violates the terms of the GPL. Debian is very particular about making sure we are always in the clear about any potential copyright issue. LGPL for Elmer is unfortunately not possible at the moment, but an GLP exception might be taken under consideration. How would you like to see the exception be documented for being compatible with Debian policies? I'm afraid I don't have enough experience with this to give good advice here. Can someone on debian-legal perhaps provide an example of a copyright statement which provides such an GPL exception? Thank you again, -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: Debian package for Elmer - Re: ITP: Elmer -- Finite element software for multiphysics problems
On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 21:50 +0100, Francesco Poli wrote: On Fri, 14 Nov 2008 08:57:40 -0500 Adam C Powell IV wrote: [...] On Thu, 2008-11-13 at 23:49 +0200, Mikko Lyly wrote: [...] Indeed, you're fine as far as your distribution is concerned; as far as I can tell no GPL code in the fem directory written by others which is linked to ARPACK. As the Elmer copyright holder, you just need to abide by the ARPACK license, and can do whatever you want with the Elmer code. But if Debian redistributes it, and the code changes hands, the owner of the Elmer copyright can in theory restrict Debian from distributing it. [...] LGPL for Elmer is unfortunately not possible at the moment, but an GLP exception might be taken under consideration. How would you like to see the exception be documented for being compatible with Debian policies? I'm afraid I don't have enough experience with this to give good advice here. Can someone on debian-legal perhaps provide an example of a copyright statement which provides such an GPL exception? Hi Adam, hi everyone else! Hi Francesco! [I am keeping you and the other addresses in Cc:, since you asked to be Cc:ed in the past and I suppose the other people are not subscribed to debian-legal] Thanks, no need for me since I subscribe to debian-science. If I understand correctly, the issue is that Elmer, which is distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL, links against ARPACK, which is available under GPL-incompatible and non-free terms. The distributability issue may be solved with a GPL exception granted from Elmer copyright holders, as long as no other purely GPL'ed code is included in or linked with Elmer. That is to say, *each* copyright holder of GPL'ed code included in or linked with Elmer must agree with the GPL exception. To clarify: each copyright holder of GPL'ed code in the binary/binaries which link with ARPACK needs to agree. As mentioned, my review of the fem directory showed that CSC owns the copyright to all of the code in question (ElmerSolver, libelmersolver, all of the equation plugins). Assuming that all such copyright holders agree, the canonical example GPL linking exception is detailed at http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs Thanks, I was not aware of this. On the other hand, I think you (Adam) are aware that this solution would force Elmer to be placed in the contrib Debian archive (rather than in main), Yup, my pre-upload package is already in contrib. with the additional inconvenience that ARPACK has now been removed from Debian: http://bugs.debian.org/497900 I re-uploaded it into non-free a couple of days ago. I would recommend getting in touch with ARPACK upstream maintainers and persuading them to relicense ARPACK under DFSG-free and GPL-compatible terms (a 3-clause BSD license would be an optimal suggestion). Indeed, will do. I hope this helps. Disclaimers: IANAL, TINLA, IANADD, TINASOTODP. It helps a lot! Thanks, -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: OpenCascade license opinion
On Wed, 2008-01-02 at 02:45 +0100, Aurelien Jarno wrote: On Mon, Dec 31, 2007 at 02:20:24PM -0500, Adam C Powell IV wrote: On Fri, 2007-12-21 at 21:32 +0100, Aurelien Jarno wrote: Adam C Powell IV a écrit : On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 02:25 +0100, Aurelien Jarno wrote: Adam C Powell IV a écrit : It depends on OpenCascade, which has a license which sounds DFSG-free. The license is at: http://www.opencascade.org/occ/license/ There were two discussions on the OpenCascade license last year:d * http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/06/msg00222.html concluded: the In short preamble description is not free, but the license itself is, so an upstream declaration that the preamble is not binding would make it DFSG-free. * http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/03/msg00286.html concluded that the WildMagic license is non-free, but did not conclude anything about OpenCascade. Aurelien, did you contact upstream and receive any reply on the preamble status? I don't see anything in WNPP, nor in unstable, nor in incoming. Yes I have contacted upstream about the preamble. They answered me vaguely about the whole license, saying that it is clear that any changes have to be sent back. Interesting. I think John Halton's point yesterday was correct: this is not a preamble (my fault for misusing the term), but an explanatory note. Based on that, I was getting ready to package and upload... If the upstream license is free, but upstream thinks it is not (or intends that it not be), then is it really free? The problem is that the current upstream is not the one that has written the code. The old copyright older (Matra) may have chosen the license before, and OpenCascade tries to change the meaning of the license without changing it, as their business is also to install OpenCascade on the customer machines. Well it's only an hypothesis, I can be completely wrong. I see. Then again they just released CADLinux which makes installation of Salomé and its dependencies much easier, so they should have no problem in practice with having Debian distribute it -- they must have done the calculation of how much installation business they'd lose, and decided it's worth the hit to broaden their potential customer base. So there's likely no exposure to Debian for distributing it, even if upstream thinks the free license is non-free. So where to put the package: main or non-free? I would say non-free. It's really easy to move the package from non-free to main when we are sure the license is DFSG compliant. And this way we haven't to wait before starting the packaging. Okay. I take this to mean that you haven't started the packaging. I've made a little start, which you can see (once it finishes uploading) at: http://lyre.mit.edu/~powell/opencascade/ (at least full sources should be there within 1/2 hour) My GPG key is at http://lyre.mit.edu/~powell/pubkey.txt There are comments on the package in README.Debian.html; I'd add from the latest build that: * Somehow make install DESTDIR=$(CURDIR)/debian/tmp didn't install any header files; it didn't even make usr/include! So the package is effectively unusable. :-( So much for testing. * Because of filenames like config.h and init.h I wonder if the package should have its own subdir of /usr/include to avoid collisions with other packages... * There's something funky about rules such that if I do install: build it tries to run the patch-stamp target again. I can't for the life of me find the stupid flaw, and it's driving me nuts. Please let me know if you see it. * In the meantime, without that, it builds just fine under dpkg-buildpackage which does debian/rules build then fakeroot debian/rules binary. * I plan to put the .la files into the -dev package. * There are tons of warnings from dh_shlibdeps of the type debian/opencascade-tools/usr/bin/DRAWEXE shouldn't be linked with libpthread.so.0 (it uses none of its symbols). I'll need to do some makefile hacking to get rid of these before uploading. * D'oh! I accidentally put nonfree instead of non-free in the binary package descriptions... I'll deal with the other lintian issues another time. And see README.Debian.html which, in its next iteration, will actually describe the package... So, very preliminary, but release early, release often right? :-) Please also note that in the sources, the copyright header of triangle.c looks problematic. It is clearly non-DFSG free, and Open CASCADE doesn't seems to have any copyright on this file. They never answered me about that point. I see. Thanks for looking
Re: OpenCascade license opinion
[Sorry to let the thread drop for so long] On Fri, 2007-12-21 at 21:32 +0100, Aurelien Jarno wrote: Adam C Powell IV a écrit : On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 02:25 +0100, Aurelien Jarno wrote: Adam C Powell IV a écrit : It depends on OpenCascade, which has a license which sounds DFSG-free. The license is at: http://www.opencascade.org/occ/license/ There were two discussions on the OpenCascade license last year:d * http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/06/msg00222.html concluded: the In short preamble description is not free, but the license itself is, so an upstream declaration that the preamble is not binding would make it DFSG-free. * http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/03/msg00286.html concluded that the WildMagic license is non-free, but did not conclude anything about OpenCascade. Aurelien, did you contact upstream and receive any reply on the preamble status? I don't see anything in WNPP, nor in unstable, nor in incoming. Yes I have contacted upstream about the preamble. They answered me vaguely about the whole license, saying that it is clear that any changes have to be sent back. Interesting. I think John Halton's point yesterday was correct: this is not a preamble (my fault for misusing the term), but an explanatory note. Based on that, I was getting ready to package and upload... If the upstream license is free, but upstream thinks it is not (or intends that it not be), then is it really free? The problem is that the current upstream is not the one that has written the code. The old copyright older (Matra) may have chosen the license before, and OpenCascade tries to change the meaning of the license without changing it, as their business is also to install OpenCascade on the customer machines. Well it's only an hypothesis, I can be completely wrong. I see. Then again they just released CADLinux which makes installation of Salomé and its dependencies much easier, so they should have no problem in practice with having Debian distribute it -- they must have done the calculation of how much installation business they'd lose, and decided it's worth the hit to broaden their potential customer base. So there's likely no exposure to Debian for distributing it, even if upstream thinks the free license is non-free. So where to put the package: main or non-free? Francesco, I read the Linux Today story which you linked, and don't see how it's relevant. Which terms of this license correspond to the Pine terms, or are non-DFSG free? Please also note that in the sources, the copyright header of triangle.c looks problematic. It is clearly non-DFSG free, and Open CASCADE doesn't seems to have any copyright on this file. They never answered me about that point. I see. Thanks for looking at it in such detail! Perhaps that one part can be stripped out. AFAIK this file is essential in Salomé. Then we can re-implement it, starting with stubs which return errors. Do you know whether this is critical to core functionality, or just one of many side-features which a Salomé executable links against? Let me know how I can help. I want my clients (and non-clients) to be able to install this easily on Debian and Ubuntu machines, so I'd be willing to put some time into the package(s). Cheers, -Adam -- GPG fingerprint: D54D 1AEE B11C CE9B A02B C5DD 526F 01E8 564E E4B6 Engineering consulting with open source tools http://www.opennovation.com/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OpenCascade license opinion
On Mon, 2007-12-31 at 23:20 +0100, Francesco Poli wrote: On Mon, 31 Dec 2007 14:20:24 -0500 Adam C Powell IV wrote: [...] Francesco, I read the Linux Today story which you linked, and don't see how it's relevant. It's another case where a license is interpreted by upstream in an awkward way, thus making the work non-free. Okay, though the Pine license itself has non-free terms (may not be redistributed with non-free software), where the OpenCascade license is a free license. Requiring that modifications are sent back to the original author is a non-free requirement. The license text does not seem to include such a non-free restriction, but upstream claims that the restriction is clearly present. I think this situation is similar to the Pine one, that's why I pointed that Linux Today story out... I hope I clarified. Okay, thanks. But the analogy would be better, and the outcome clearer, if the Pine license were itself free, which it's not. Here we have a free license, and non-free upstream interpretation, so it's not as clear where the package should go. Usual disclaimers: IANAL, TINLA, IANADD, TINASOTODP. Me neither. Well, I'm a DD. Where do we get ASOTODP, only after attempting to upload? Cheers, -Adam -- GPG fingerprint: D54D 1AEE B11C CE9B A02B C5DD 526F 01E8 564E E4B6 Engineering consulting with open source tools http://www.opennovation.com/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OpenCascade license opinion
On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 02:25 +0100, Aurelien Jarno wrote: Adam C Powell IV a écrit : Greetings, I just sent in an RFP for Salomé, a very nice and highly capable engineering tool under LGPL. That was my goal when I started to look at packaging OpenCascade. But there is a lot of work, as Salomé depends on a lot of libraries or softwares that are not yet in Debian. Really? The primary one seems to be OpenCascade, I don't see others that would be problematic. It depends on OpenCascade, which has a license which sounds DFSG-free. The license is at: http://www.opencascade.org/occ/license/ There were two discussions on the OpenCascade license last year:d * http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/06/msg00222.html concluded: the In short preamble description is not free, but the license itself is, so an upstream declaration that the preamble is not binding would make it DFSG-free. * http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/03/msg00286.html concluded that the WildMagic license is non-free, but did not conclude anything about OpenCascade. Aurelien, did you contact upstream and receive any reply on the preamble status? I don't see anything in WNPP, nor in unstable, nor in incoming. Yes I have contacted upstream about the preamble. They answered me vaguely about the whole license, saying that it is clear that any changes have to be sent back. Interesting. I think John Halton's point yesterday was correct: this is not a preamble (my fault for misusing the term), but an explanatory note. Based on that, I was getting ready to package and upload... If the upstream license is free, but upstream thinks it is not (or intends that it not be), then is it really free? Please also note that in the sources, the copyright header of triangle.c looks problematic. It is clearly non-DFSG free, and Open CASCADE doesn't seems to have any copyright on this file. They never answered me about that point. I see. Thanks for looking at it in such detail! Perhaps that one part can be stripped out. -Adam -- GPG fingerprint: D54D 1AEE B11C CE9B A02B C5DD 526F 01E8 564E E4B6 Engineering consulting with open source tools http://www.opennovation.com/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
OpenCascade license opinion
Greetings, I just sent in an RFP for Salomé, a very nice and highly capable engineering tool under LGPL. It depends on OpenCascade, which has a license which sounds DFSG-free. The license is at: http://www.opencascade.org/occ/license/ There were two discussions on the OpenCascade license last year: * http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/06/msg00222.html concluded: the In short preamble description is not free, but the license itself is, so an upstream declaration that the preamble is not binding would make it DFSG-free. * http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/03/msg00286.html concluded that the WildMagic license is non-free, but did not conclude anything about OpenCascade. Aurelien, did you contact upstream and receive any reply on the preamble status? I don't see anything in WNPP, nor in unstable, nor in incoming. The preamble is: In short, Open CASCADE Technology Public License is LGPL-like with certain differences. You are permitted to use Open CASCADE Technology within commercial environments and you are obliged to acknowledge its use. You are also obliged to send your modifications of the original source code (if you have made any) to the Initial Developer (i.e. Open CASCADE S.A.S.). The no private modifications without sending them upstream part doesn't actually say that. I see it in section 4, provided that: You document all Your Modifications, indicate the date of each such Modifications, designate the version of the Software You used, prominently include a file carrying such information with respect to the Modifications and duplicate the copyright and other proprietary notices and disclaimers attached hereto as Schedule B or any other notices or disclaimers attached to the Software with your Modifications. That's a pretty stringent requirement, but I'm not sure it makes it non-free. (This is what makes it more stringent than GPL/LGPL, and probably GPL-incompatible.) I think patch files in a package, or even the Debian .diff.gz file, should qualify as sufficiently describing the modifications and timestamps. A quick Google search turned up a Slashdot article claiming this is not OSD-free. But when I go to the article, a search for Cascade turns up nothing... Thanks for any help you can provide, and please CC me on replies. -Adam -- GPG fingerprint: D54D 1AEE B11C CE9B A02B C5DD 526F 01E8 564E E4B6 Engineering consulting with open source tools http://www.opennovation.com/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Netscape on Alpha?
Walter Landry wrote: Andrea Mennucc [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: the problem: Debian Alpha is lacking a good browser the solution: there is a version of Netscape 4.7-4 that was compiled by Compaq for Tru64; this version is also distributed by RedHat for Alpha; some people have passed it thru alien and installed it, and it works; it would take me 20 minutes to upload it into Debian archives (unstable/non-free) the question: it contains some libraries by Compaq: can I upload it? The license follows. In the snippet you posted, there was no permission to redistribute. Debian needs that in order to even put it in non-free. Also, I couldn't get the alphalinux web site to work. I imagine that there is more to the license than what you described. I found the website at http://help.netscape.com/kb/consumer/19990123-1.html which has some different options for running netscape. It talks about needing some licenses for running the original libraries. If you could clear all of this up, then Debian might be able to distribute Netscape (but maybe not). There's another option: an installer package in the style of realplayer and the Compaq (Alpha) math library packages. This would require the user to download the relevant files, then install them in a Debian way. Just a thought, -- -Adam P. GPG fingerprint: D54D 1AEE B11C CE9B A02B C5DD 526F 01E8 564E E4B6 Welcome to the best software in the world today cafe! http://lyre.mit.edu/%7Epowell/The_Best_Stuff_In_The_World_Today_Cafe.ogg
