Hi. I just wanted to package a piece of software and saw that it is licensed under the IBM Public License[1] (IPL). Since the license included some suspicios clauses I searched the list archives about it. The findings were confusing: - There are many discussions (e.g. [2], [3]) about the patent clause (§7, paragraph 2) but no consensus on whether it is non-free or not. - There are statements that it is free and nobody objected[4] - On debian-legal noone ever mentioned the clause (§3, last paragraph) "In addition, each Contributor must identify itself as the originator of its Contribution, if any, in a manner that reasonably allows subsequent Recipients to identify the originator of the Contribution." which seems to fail the dissident test. Has the interpretation of such clauses changed in the last years or am I misunderstanding something? [1] http://www-124.ibm.com/developerworks/oss/license10.html [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/01/msg00005.html [3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/01/msg00262.html [4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2001/12/msg00141.html Gruesse, -- Frank Lichtenheld <djpig@debian.org> www: http://www.djpig.de/
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