Re: A short licence check

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org>]

On Sun, Aug 22, 2004 at 01:58:11PM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 22, 2004 at 02:51:39PM +0200, Igor Stroh wrote:
> > could someone check this licence[1]? I believe it's somewhat BSD-like,
> > but I'm not quite sure. It's the licence of python-gtk2-tutorial. Since
> > there's no description of what kind of licence this actually is, I'm afraid
> > the ftp-masters won't like it...
> 
> This is a GPL-incompatible, copyleft, DFSG-free license. In other
> respects it is a MIT clone, not a BSD one; this is essentially a
> copyleft MIT license.

There's no such thing as a copyleft MIT license.  Fundamental to the
concept of the MIT/BSD license is that they're permissive--they let
you do whatever you want, placing very few restrictions on the work.
"Permissive" and "copyleft" are conflicting adjectives for a license,
in my opinion.

This license is incompatible with the licenses of both Python (BSDish
with a changelog clause) and GTK2 (LGPL), and so will prevent incorporating
any code snippets from the source of those libraries into this documentation,
or vice versa.  That may not be a problem, since this is a tutorial and
not a reference, though it would prevent the incorporation of this tutorial
with such a reference.

I agree that it's GPL-incompatible, that it's DFSG-free, and that it
sucks badly.

-- 
Glenn Maynard