Re: Thoughts about gnuplot license and copyrights

[Lars H. <lhe...@us...>]

Dave Denholm writes:
[...] 
> It may prevent the gnuplot terminal drivers from being
> distributed with another program. (Maybe not : it says you cannot
> distribute complete modified source tree, but doesn't see you cannot
> distribute a partial set of unmodified sources..?)

 This only serves to demonstrate how badly thought out the license is
 in the first place. Along with your cvs example further down.

> I guess an analogy would be with gnu readline : the GPL
> prevents us from distributing a gnuplot binary that links with it, but
> someone building from source can link *their* copy with gnu readline.
 
 Readline is a fscked up case: it should really be distributed under LGPL
 rather than GPL ...

> Depends on your motives : when I got involved with gnuplot, it was
> because *I* was using it a lot, and I wanted to improve it for my own
> use. Contributing the changes let others benefit from them, but more
> importantly, meant I didn't have to rework the changes locally when a
> new version came out. At the time, I didn't realise how rare new
> releases were ;-)
 
 That pretty much sums it up for me, too ;-)

> Maybe one way out is to persuade Thomas Williams to grant permission
> to a trusted nominee to release as and when required. Thomas would
> retain the option to revoke that permission at a time of his choosing,
> but it does mean that if he does vanish, there is one other person can
> release..
 
 I must add that getting permission for a release, while it sounds like
 a big thing, was never a problem - my ipression was rather that tw is
 happy enough to see ongoing development. There waws a discussion about
 backwards-compatibility before the 4.0 release, due the syntax changes,
 but that was resolved quickly (the 4.x branch will continue to accept
 the old syntax).

 Once this discussion is settled, I will write up a summary and raise
 all the valid points with tw. It would be nice if at the same time I
 was in a position to tell him we're closing in on a new release :)