[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: possible licensing issues with some scsh source files



On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 10:55:23AM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 10:39:56AM +0100, Daniel Kobras wrote:
> > We're currently trying to sort out the non-free status of scsh within
> > Debian. Most of the issues are unambiguous, however, I'd like to see
> > some more opinions on the following two clauses contained in a couple of
> > source files.
> > 
> > scsh-0.6.4/scheme/big/sort.scm:
> > 
> > ;;; 2. Users of this software agree to make their best efforts (a) to return
> > ;;;    to the T Project at Yale any improvements or extensions that they make,
> > ;;;    so that these may be included in future releases; and (b) to inform
> > ;;;    the T Project of noteworthy uses of this software.
> 
> Harmless. My best effort consists of waving a gerbil at my workstation
> and hoping something along those lines happens. (If this were an
> actual requirement, rather than a vague request, it would be a
> problem. I strongly discourage people from writing noise like this
> into licenses though - put it in the README where it belongs.)

On reflection, we've rejected this exact clause (in its MIT Scheme
incarnation) as non-free in the past, after some heavy analysis of the
wording.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
 `. `'                          |
   `-             -><-          |

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Digital signature


Reply to: