spice3 license and richard stallman
Continuing the quest for the spice license, here is what I found out.
All spice programs and patches on sunsite refer to this license:
Copying-policy: Free for people friendly to the U.S.A.
On http://hera.eecs.berkeley.edu/~software/distribute.policy.html, the
site where
spice originates from, there is no talk about such a license.
But there is some kind of license on
http://hera.eecs.berkeley.edu/~software/software.agree.html.
I find the berkeley pages confusing. Although they clearly want you to
order their software and they ask money for it, they talk about an
open-software approach and "making the source code available as a public
service, for research purposes".
My english is not that good, but what I understand from these pages is
that distributing spice with debian might not be possible.
How spice ever ended up on sunsite I find very strange. Maybe they
changed their license over the years?
To add to the confusion, here is a quote from README.patches, which
comes
from spice3f4-patches-1.1.tar.gz (also on sunsite):
- - - - - - - - -
Note: To quell some confusion regarding licensing, it was made known
to me that Richard Stallman, founder of GNU, convinced Berkeley to
place Spice version 3 under a free license.
- - - - - - - - -
Does anyone know Richard Stallman? Maybe we can find out what the status
is.
The patches a dated december 7, 1997.
Joop
--
Joop pa3aba@debian.org
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