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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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