Re: Thoughts about gnuplot license and copyrights

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Wednesday 18 January 2006 06:18 am, Dave Denholm wrote:
> It looks like the Copyright in the 4.0
> sources at least does grant permission to distribute modified
> binaries, with a few restrictions.

Right.  It currently says:

 * Permission to modify the software is granted, but not the right to
 * distribute the complete modified source code.  Modifications are to
 * be distributed as patches to the released version.  Permission to
 * distribute binaries produced by compiling modified sources is granted,
 * provided you
 *   1. distribute the corresponding source modifications from the
 *    released version in the form of a patch file along with the binaries,
 *   2. add special version identification to distinguish your version
 *    in addition to the base release version number,
 *   3. provide your name and address as the primary contact for the
 *    support of your modified version, and
 *   4. retain our contact information in regard to use of the base
 *    software.
 * Permission to distribute the released version of the source code along
 * with corresponding source modifications in the form of a patch file is
 * granted with same provisions 2 through 4 for binary distributions.

> 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)

As I read it, and on the basis of previous correspondence with 
members of the Debian packaging group, this is also sufficient
to allow the various linux distros to package and include 4.1
direct from the cvs version even without a new official release.
It would require packaging the 4.1 source as a diff against 4.0.
This would be a rather large diff file, admittedly.  But it would
certainly have been a reasonable mechanism for them to have
released a bug-fix update to 4.0 based on our 4.0 stable branch.
In the next release cycle we should try to make this more
obvious to the various packaging teams.

   [insert standard I-am-not-a-lawyer disclaimer]

But I really think we do need to start on the path to an official
4.2 release.  Recent suggestions from several directions to
put a 4.1 snapshot on the web site have produced little
response.   Does anyone have specific objections?
It would not commit us to any fixed release date;  it would
just start the ball rolling.

	Ethan



-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle WA