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Re: ECW License



Steve Halasz wrote:
> I would appreciate a thumbs up or down on the dfsg compliance of the
> attached license before I put time into packaging. I suspect there might
> be issues with these requirements:
>
> iii)    You are not permitted to change the ECW file format.
> iv)     You are not permitted to use Software Product for development or
> distribution of "Server Software" that provides services or
> functionality on a computer acting as a server.

You are correct: those two restrictions are indeed non-free.  There is a
third non-free requirement as well, item 1) e) iii) "If the items are
not available to the general public, and the initial developer of the
Software requests a copy of the items, then you must supply one."  Each
of those three restrictions is sufficient to make the software non-free.

Note that I only considered the version of their license that was
targetted at Free Software, specifically GPLed software; the other two
are clearly non-free.  Furthermore, it should be noted that while their
license seems to grant permission to build GPLed software based on their
system, the GPL itself does *not* grant that permission (since this
license is non-free), so any such GPLed software would need an exception
clause to be distributable.

> And is it ok to link GDAL(MIT license) against this library?

As Andrew Suffield said, the MIT license does not prohibit you from
linking MIT-licensed software against another work.  The other software
license could theoretically do so, but does not in this case.  This
would imply that GDAL would have to go into contrib, since this library
is non-free.

- Josh Triplett

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