Re: OpenCascade license opinion
Adam C Powell IV a écrit :
> 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.
No they aren't problematic. But there is a lot of work to do given the
number of libraries.
>>> 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?
The problem is that the current upstream is not the one that has written
the code. The old copyright older (Matra) may have chosen the license
before, and OpenCascade tries to change the meaning of the license
without changing it, as their business is also to install OpenCascade on
the customer machines. Well it's only an hypothesis, I can be completely
wrong.
>> 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.
>
AFAIK this file is essential in Salomé.
--
.''`. Aurelien Jarno | GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
: :' : Debian developer | Electrical Engineer
`. `' aurel32@debian.org | aurelien@aurel32.net
`- people.debian.org/~aurel32 | www.aurel32.net
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