Re: Thoughts about gnuplot license and copyrights

[Dave D. <dde...@es...>]

Lars Hecking <lhe...@us...> writes:

>> I have concluded that Thomas Williams is the one who has to give its
>> agreement before an official release. Can you confirm ? Would it be
>
>  That is correct. As the other copyright holder, Colin Kelley, is missing
>  in action, Thomas Williams is our only contact.
>
>> possible to have further details on his position about the license ?

>> Archives say that the gpl was refused. Is there a precise reason, or is
>> Thomas William simply opposed to a change ? Another open-source license
>> may fit the needs.


My recollection is that Thomas Williams is (or was) opposed the notion
that gnuplot might ever fork into multiple, incompatible versions.

>
>  I have discussed development issues with Thomas in the past, and the only
>  time I ever mentioned license changes (and the "single point of failure"
>  issue) there was no reply. I'm sure that particular email was received,
>  and we were in contact again for the 4.0 release - which he liked a lot :)
>
>> By the way, as the FAQ doesn't mention it, the actual position of the
>> author against licenses could be a good addition.
>
>  I really have nothing to back this up, but people like Dave Denholm or
>  Alex Woo might.
>

I've dug out a very old mail folder "gnuplot.legal" which contains a
thread from around August 1977 (wow, that's old...)

But I suspect it's obsolete, since it was arguing about changing the
license to allow distribution of modified binaries. Previously, this
was completely prohibited, but it looks like the Copyright in the 4.0
sources at least does grant permission to distribute modified
binaries, with a few restrictions.

At the time, this was enough to happify Richard Stallman (who actually
approached me around this time to write a truly free gnuplot clone if
the license wouldn't get changed)

It's currently just a collection of separate mh files, but if anyone's
interested, I can pack it into an mbox and upload it somewhere.


Since I never actually got round to making a gnuplot release during my
time as maintenaner, I didn't have to go through all this pain myself!


dd
-- 
Dave Denholm              <dde...@es...>       http://www.esmertec.com