Re: CISST licence and DFSG
Jochen Sprickerhof <debian@jochen.sprickerhof.de> writes:
> as part of packaging ROS [1] for Debian, I've found a file [2] under the
> CISST licence [3]. Can someone comment on the DFSG compatibility of
> it?
Thank you for including the full text of the license terms and
conditions, for discussion in this forum.
> P.S.: Please Cc me as I'm not on the list.
Done.
> CISST Software License Agreement
The text is rather convoluted and significantly more “legalese” (long,
tortuous sentences with many clauses), so I don't feel confident yet
that I could precisely judge its effects on freedom.
Some observations:
* The text tries very hard to make it an “agreement”, not a grant of
license. (It arrogates to the copyright holder the power to deny the
recipient even the right to “display” or “use” the work.) That is a
red flag; software freedom is threatened if the recipient must perform
some specific positive action to receive such freedom.
* The conditions appear to crib from other 1980s-era university license
texts, in particular the BSD-with-obnoxious-advertising-requirement
conditions. That requirement is especially problematic as it
forecloses use cases that should be permitted by a free software
license.
* The wording is very different from, and probably incompatible with,
existing well-understood free-software license conditions. This
exacerbates license proliferation, and makes it needlessly difficult
for recipients to know what the effects would be of combining works
under other licenses with works under these conditions.
* The text in part tries to permit relicensing under “proprietary”
conditions, without defining that. It also in part tries to encourage
recipients to grant “open source” license in their derived works,
without defining that. Whatever else these are supposed to mean, they
are surely in conflict, and the whole is at risk of denying the
recipient any effective license as a result of incoherent conditions.
* Several clauses, if binding, make the work more restrictive even than
earlier border-line problematic license texts: e.g., requiring
acknowledgement of the absence of FDA approval, among other
restrictionss. A simple non-binding assertion of these would be fine;
but phrasing them as requirements, in a legal text that explicitly
denies license unless the recipient agrees, makes this a problem for
freedom of the recipient.
As a result of all the above, I think we should not accept a work
licensed under these terms.
The copyright holder should be strongly encouraged to instead choose an
existing, widely-scrutinised, well-understood free software license.
(Can you take on the job of that correspondence?)
Based on the apparent intentions (as far as I can parse them from the
convoluted text), I would recommend:
* If they actually want recipients to be free to make derived works and
redistribute under non-free license terms, the “BSD with attribution
required and endorsement forbidden” license conditions (the “3-clause
BSD license” <URL:https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause>).
* If they actually want to encourage recipients to make derived works
available under free license terms, then grant license “under the
terms of the GNU General Public License, as published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 3 of that License or, at your
option, any later version” <URL:https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html>.
Thank you for taking care to verify the freedom of works in Debian. Good
hunting in your efforts to resolve this issue.
--
\ “… whoever claims any right that he is unwilling to accord to |
`\ his fellow-men is dishonest and infamous.” —Robert G. |
_o__) Ingersoll, _The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child_, 1877 |
Ben Finney <ben@benfinney.id.au>
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