Oliver: Please see the attached discussion regarding the licensing of alliance. Can you provide us with a clarification of your intentions? Is it your intention for the licensing of alliance to be in full compliance of the GPL? -- Chris Ruffin <c.ruffin@ieee.org> ----- Forwarded message from Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu> ----- From: Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu> Date: Mon, 01 Apr 2002 17:54:08 -0800 (PST) To: cmruffin@debian.org Cc: bombe@informatik.tu-muenchen.de, debian-legal@lists.debian.org, 140103@bugs.debian.org Subject: Re: Bug#140103: ITP: alliance -- VLSI CAD system X-Mailer: Mew version 2.2 on Emacs 21.1 / Mule 5.0 (SAKAKI) Chris Ruffin <cmruffin@debian.org> wrote: > I was a little concerned about that as well, but my (uninformed and > possibly incorrect) conclusion was that this contradiction in their > licensing text was a dispute between the developers of the software > and the author of the GPL. AFAIK the addition of the requirement to > mention the BSD-style acclamation doesn't violate anything in the > DFSG, and to my knowledge doesn't invalidate the GPL. After all the > BSD license meets the DFSG. Is it really up to us to resolve this? The notification clause is incompatible with the GPL. They are being inconsistent. It would be best to ask for a clarification. Until then, Debian shouldn't distribute it. In any case, they could write their own license which is basically the GPL with this added restriction. That might even be DFSG-free, though the use restriction makes it annoying. It would also be incompatible with anything else under the GPL. Phrasing it as a request would be much more polite, and wouldn't require surgery on the GPL. I don't know exactly what this software does, but they could also have the software insert the phrase into the output, much like Latex2HTML does. Regards, Walter Landry wlandry@ucsd.edu ----- End forwarded message -----
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