While looking at the gnuplot documentation (trying to figure out
how to make a bar graph) I came across this in the FAQ:
1.6 Legalities
Gnuplot is freeware authored by a collection of volunteers, who cannot
make any legal statement about the compliance or non-compliance of
gnuplot or its uses. There is also no warranty whatsoever. Use at your
own risk.
Citing from the README of a mathematical subroutine package by R. Freund:
For all intent and purpose, any description of what the codes are
doing should be construed as being a note of what we thought the codes
did on our machine on a particular Tuesday of last year. If you're
really lucky, they might do the same for you someday. Then again, do you
really feel *that* lucky?
1.7 Does gnuplot have anything to do with the FSF and the GNU project?
Gnuplot is neither written nor maintained by the FSF. It is not covered
by the General Public License, either. It used to be distributed by the
FSF, however, due to licensing issues it is no longer.
Gnuplot is freeware in the sense that you don't have to pay for it.
However it is not freeware in the sense that you would be allowed to
distribute a modified version of your gnuplot freely. Please read and
accept the Copyright file in your distribution.
So, I checked the copyright file and found this:
* Permission to modify the software is granted, but not the right to
* distribute the complete modified source code. Modifications are to
* be distributed as patches to the released version. Permission to
* distribute binaries produced by compiling modified sources is granted,
* provided you
* 1. distribute the corresponding source modifications from the
* released version in the form of a patch file along with the binaries,
* 2. add special version identification to distinguish your version
* in addition to the base release version number,
* 3. provide your name and address as the primary contact for the
* support of your modified version, and
* 4. retain our contact information in regard to use of the base
* software.
* Permission to distribute the released version of the source code along
* with corresponding source modifications in the form of a patch file is
* granted with same provisions 2 through 4 for binary distributions.
This seems very similar to the pine and qmail licenses
(http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/license-list.html#NonFreeSoftwareLicense)
which would make it non-free. Is this correct? Should a bug be filed
against the gnuplot* packages?
-Roberto
P.S. please CC me as I am not subscribed to -legal
--
Roberto C. Sanchez
http://familiasanchez.net/~sanchezr
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