An advise how to apply for the TkMan author to change his license.
TkMan is a graphical, hypertext manual page and Texinfo browser.
Besides a no-warranty part, TkMan license says that
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
documentation for educational, research, internal corporate and
non-profit purposes, without fee, and without a written agreement is
hereby granted for all cases that do not conflict with the restriction
in the first sentence of this paragraph, provided that the above
copyright notice, this paragraph, and the following three paragraphs
appear in all copies.
Permission to incorporate this software into commercial products may
be obtained from the Office of Technology Licensing, 2150 Shattuck
Avenue, Suite 510, Berkeley, CA 94704.
However the author (Tomas A. Phelps <phelps@ACM.org>) also writes that
"... I hope CD-ROM distributors include it in their collections, which they
can do for free."
This made me think that the author considers the license to be too formal and
not reflecting his true willingness to share his work with others. Does it
make sense or is it that I am trying too hard to find a way to enable TkMan
gets into main?
Following my conclusion about why the author has made his last statement I am
considering applying to him with a request to modify the license to the GPL.
I want to tell him that I think this is appropriate becuase:
(1) My belief as to why he has explicitly added his remark for CD-ROM
distributors.
(2) That the sum of the original license and the permission for CD-ROM
distributors to include it in their collections includes for all practical
matters all the interested parties in TkMan. Yet the current license does not
let groups that are more committed to the promotion of the free software idea
as well as distributing packages of software, such as Debian, to fully include
it in their collection.
Does it make sense? Are there other arguments that might be raised? Can
someone rephrase all the arguments in a better English?
Although I believe that there is a case here I also believe that I will not be
able to fully take advantage of it. There for, if someone more experienced
with this kind of stuff want to try then I believe it will be most helpful.
--
Shaul Karl shaulk@israsrv.net.il
An elephant is a mouse with an operating system.
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