Re: OpenCascade license opinion
On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 02:25 +0100, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> Adam C Powell IV a écrit :
> > Greetings,
> >
> > I just sent in an RFP for Salomé, a very nice and highly capable
> > engineering tool under LGPL.
>
> That was my goal when I started to look at packaging OpenCascade. But
> there is a lot of work, as Salomé depends on a lot of libraries or
> softwares that are not yet in Debian.
Really? The primary one seems to be OpenCascade, I don't see others
that would be problematic.
> > It depends on OpenCascade, which has a license which sounds DFSG-free.
> > The license is at: http://www.opencascade.org/occ/license/
> >
> > There were two discussions on the OpenCascade license last year:d
> >
> > * http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/06/msg00222.html
> > concluded: the "In short" preamble description is not free, but
> > the license itself is, so an upstream declaration that the
> > preamble is not binding would make it DFSG-free.
> > * http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/03/msg00286.html
> > concluded that the WildMagic license is non-free, but did not
> > conclude anything about OpenCascade.
> >
> > Aurelien, did you contact upstream and receive any reply on the preamble
> > status? I don't see anything in WNPP, nor in unstable, nor in incoming.
>
> Yes I have contacted upstream about the preamble. They answered me
> vaguely about the whole license, saying that it is clear that any
> changes have to be sent back.
Interesting. I think John Halton's point yesterday was correct: this is
not a preamble (my fault for misusing the term), but an explanatory
note. Based on that, I was getting ready to package and upload...
If the upstream license is free, but upstream thinks it is not (or
intends that it not be), then is it really free?
> Please also note that in the sources, the copyright header of triangle.c
> looks problematic. It is clearly non-DFSG free, and Open CASCADE doesn't
> seems to have any copyright on this file. They never answered me about
> that point.
I see. Thanks for looking at it in such detail! Perhaps that one part
can be stripped out.
-Adam
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