Re: IBM documentation license
Scripsit Eduard Bloch <blade@debian.org>
> IMHO it is non-free, however it is full of juristical english and
> may be acceptable for main if one can extract the relevant parts from
> all the blah, blah.
No, this parts pretty much kills everything without even trying to
make sense of the rest:
> IBM reserves the right to withdraw permission to reproduce
> copyrighted material whenever, in its discretion, it feels that
> the privilege of reproducing its material is being used in a way
> detrimental to its interest or the above instructions are not
> being followed properly to protect its copyright.
The bottom contains a freeish-looking license to any example programs
in the implementation (but only example programs, not the actual
documentation):
> This information contains sample application programs in source
> language, which illustrates programming techniques on various
> operating platforms. You may copy, modify, and distribute these
> sample programs in any form without payment to IBM, for the
> purposes of developing, using, marketing or distributing
> application programs conforming to the application programming
> interface for the operating platform for which the sample programs
> are written.
However, even if it may *look* freeish, it actually *is* not free,
because the permission to copy, modify, and distribute is given only
for certain purposes. (For example, the examples cannot be used for
the purpose of deriving programs the are examples of the use of a
different but related interfaces).
--
Henning Makholm "*Dansk Folkeparti*, nazistisk orienteret dansk parti
1941-1945, grundlagt af Svend E. Johansen og Th.M. Andersen"
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