Re: Licences ok?

[dark@xs4all.nl (Richard Braakman)]

> ;;; Written by Mark Kantrowitz, School of Computer Science, 
> ;;; Carnegie Mellon University, October 1989.
> 
> ;;; Copyright (c) 1989-95 by Mark Kantrowitz. All rights reserved.
> 
> ;;; Use and copying of this software and preparation of derivative works
> ;;; based upon this software are permitted, so long as the following
> ;;; conditions are met:
> ;;;      o no fees or compensation are charged for use, copies, or
> ;;;        access to this software
> ;;;      o this copyright notice is included intact.
> ;;; This software is made available AS IS, and no warranty is made about 
> ;;; the software or its performance. 
> 
> This looks pretty non-free right?

Indeed, the "no fees or compensation" clause makes it so.

The next license has several strange clauses:

> However, all academic or commercial publication rights for CL-HTTP server in
> any form are hereby reserved.

I have no idea what this means.

> Additionally, all rights are reserved to any derivative works based on the
> Lisp source code in the CL-HTTP distribution, in particular but not limited to
> any automatic or manual translation of the source code into other computer
> languages or executables.

This makes the Lisp code non-free.
I have no idea why they want to forbid compilation of their code.

> In the meantime, the right to change this license for CL-HTTP in anyway at
> anytime is hereby reserved, any prior clauses notwithstanding.

This also makes it non-free in my book, but the DFSG is not clear about it.
As far as I'm concerned it makes the entire license meaningless; there's
nothing you can do with the code that they cannot revoke whenever they
feel like it.

> It looks free, right?

Not to me.

Richard Braakman


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