Re: academic software without licence
"may be used without restriction" does not give you the right to distribute or
modify. Use clauses only govern actual use.
I guess the bottom line is this software is probably not to be treated as free
software unless/until the author says it is. Rather annoying I know.
Ok. Asking for the permission to distribute and modify is not enough. We
need this permission for everyone. I must then ask the author to
relicence the software (under the GPL for instance).
As anybody experience with this? I would love to have a model of message
that explains the issue and ask this politely. It should be targeted at
academics.
By the way, I don't know if they can relicense easily, or must go
through a lot of administrative hassle.
Please share your experience on this.
Thanks
P.S.
For example, I am interested in packaging SEM:
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~hzhang/sem.html
which has no licence, just a "do what you want" notice.
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