License question
I've been fumbling with the idea of packaging some Vietnamese
utilities like vnterm, Vietnamese fonts, VISCII<->VIQR converters.
Many of these utilties don't specifically contain a license or
copyright information, the closest I could find is in a README file
from the MIT site they are available at. The relevant portion is
reproduced here:
--- snip ---
Copyright
=========
All software products are copyrighted by respective authors or
the TriChlor group. All rights reserved.
You may copy, distribute, and use these software for any purpose,
as long as you do not charge a fee for doing so, and
include this copyright notice.
Commercial or corporation usage or distribution requires prior consent from us.
All software is provided "as is", without express or implied warranty.
All software is provided free of charge as copyrighted freeware
(that means you can have it for free and make as many copies for
as many friends as you like, but we reserve the copyright in order
to prevent unauthorized modifications and to prevent people from
selling it to unsuspecting users---we want to keep the freeware
free).
--- snip ---
I am not a lawyer and have a hard time understanding this, but am I
correct in assuming that this is not DFSG compliant because of the
commercial usage requiring prior consent and/or also because of
"prevent unauthorized modifications..."
Basically I need to know whether this will have to be put in non-free
or should I contact the authors of each utility to possibly work
something out?
--
Ashley Clark
Reply to: