Wildmagic: The license *might* be free. It is certainly gpl-incompatable.
(c) The Software may be used, edited, modified, copied, and distributed by you for commercial products provided that suchproducts are not intended to wrap The Software solely for the purposes of selling it as if it were your own product. The intent of this clause is that you use The Software, in part or in whole,to assist you in building your own original products. An example of acceptable use is to incorporate the graphics portion of The Software in a game or game engine to be sold to an end user.An example that violates this clause is to compile a library from only The Software, bundle it with the headers files as a Software Development Kit (SDK), then sell that SDK to others. If there isany doubt about whether you can use The Software for a commercial product, contact us and explain what portions you intend to use. We will consider creating a separate legal documentthat grants you permission to use those portions of The Software in your commercial product.
That is the tricky clause. It does not prevent sale of the software bundled with other software (e.x. Debian CDs), but does prevent sale of the product by itself while under the pretense of the software being owned by the seller. The way I read it would allow the sofware to be sold by itself on a CD if the CD is being sold for convience reasons and the seller is very clear that Geometric Tools, Inc. is the real owner of the software. Let's look at the key statement again:
The Software may be used, edited, modified, copied, and distributed by you for commercial products provided that suchproducts are not intended to wrap The Software solely for the purposes of selling it as if it were your own product.
The protential problem with this licence is discimination against commerical entities. I'm thinking that the above clause allows sale of a the library with a simple wrapper as long as you do not sell it "as if it were your own product." But you could sell it "as if it were a simple wrapped version of Geometric Tools, Inc's software".
But then again that may be one of the things geometric tools was tring to prevent.
Other people's thoughts?IANAL, IANADD