Re: About MIRACL license
Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam@benfinney.id.au> writes:
> dererk <dererk@madap.com.ar> writes:
> > I need help about a software that's license under MIRACL license.
>
> Here is the current text of the license at that URL:
General notes:
No grant of freedom to redistribute. Fails DFSG§1 and makes the work
by default non-redistributable by Debian.
No apparent way to get the source code. Fails DFSG§2.
No grant of freedom to make and redistribute derived works. Fails
DFSG§3.
> =====
>
> MIRACL is FREE for non-profit making, educational, or any
> non-commercial use.
No further grants of "use" to the work are given, so this is the limit
of license grant.
Fails DFSG §6 by restricting to specific fields of endeavour.
> In other words if you aren't going to make any money out of it, we
> don't expect to either. Basically good old-fashioned
> Shareware.
Commmentary with no apparent licensing effect.
> Several precompiled Windows 'NT/95/98/00/XP Command Prompt
> executables described below are also unconditionally free.
The text gives no definition of what "unconditionally free" means, but
this fails at least DFSG§2 since no source code is provided.
> The user's manual and the reference manual are available on the
> Documentation page.
>
> For Linux support and other useful download information, see the
> README file.
Commentary with no apparent licensing effect.
> The term "commercial use" means any for-profit use of the MIRACL
> library. Any commercial use of MIRACL requires a license which may
> be obtained from Shamus Software Ltd. Updates are free.
Whatever those extra license grant, they are irrelevant for the DFSG
because DFSG§7 requires the license be distributed to all recipients
of the work, not a select group.
> [...]
> =====
The remainder of the text discussed "purchased" licenses, that fall
outside the general grant of license.
dererk <dererk@madap.com.ar> writes:
> I'm talking with it's developer, but he seems not to be interested
> in changing it[2].
> http://fish.sekure.us/forum/viewtopic.php?t=102&highlight=licence+license
The thread there expresses an "important wish" from someone posting as
"RXD". Assuming this is the copyright holder, their "important wish"
may have some legal weight; regardless of legal weight, it would be
good to at least consider such a wish.
=====
[...]
However, I have one important wish:
Keep FiSH as a pure client-to-client encryption system.
I strictly do not want any http-/java-based IRC clients to support
FiSH. This would ruin the whole purpose of IRC encryption and destroy
all the work involved.
[...]
=====
It's not clear what "support FiSH" means here for the purposes of
copyright. Whatever it means, if such a desire were to be considered a
license term then it would fail DFSG§6.
> I think it can't be even used in non-free branches :-(
It does seem to be trivially non-free, and non-redistributable.
--
\ "Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray." -- Anonymous |
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Ben Finney
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