Re: spice3 license and richard stallman

[Philippe Troin <phil@fifi.org>]

Joop Stakenborg wrote:

> 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.

Since you found the document before I sent it to you, here are some extracts:

   1.The licensee agrees not to charge for the University of California code
itself. The licensee
     may, however, charge for additions, extensions, or support.

So, you cannot charge for the software (which would make it go into non-free).
However you can charge for patches. Hence if you distribute a debian patched
version, it can go into main (the eventual charges are for your patches). I
still think this is a gross violation of the license's spirit.

Then there this form. Should someone sign it to be allowed to distribute spice ?
This would make it go nowhere (non-free cannot hold this kind of software, refer
to the gated discussion).

[snip]

> 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.

Yes, he's a pretty known figure of the free software movement.

I had tried to get spice license cleared out and exchanged a few mails with some
people a UCB, but nothing came out. They ended up by ignoring my clarification
requests.

Phil.