Re: Thoughts about gnuplot license and copyrights

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

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

> Dave Denholm writes:
> [...]=20
>> 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.
>

Actually, another program could include the *entire* unmodified
gnuplot source distribution, and compile just the terminal drivers...


>> 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..
>=20=20
>  I must add that getting permission for a release, while it sounds like
>  a big thing, was never a problem

One day, Thomas Williams *will* become unavailable, one way or
another. One hopes that he will be around for a long time to come, but
no-one is immortal.

 - 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).


I trust no-one thinks that he is trying to block development. It's
just unfortunate that this is probably the only way to avoid a fork.


However...

Timoth=E9e Lecomte <tim...@en...> writes:

>> I was going to say that even if we can no longer make releases,
>> there's always the CVS that people can download the source
>> from. However, looking at the copyright again, could it be said that
>> having the CVS available on the internet is a violation of
>>
>>  * Permission to modify the software is granted, but not the right to
>> * distribute the complete modified source code.
>=20=20
>
> You're probably right. I assume that cvs is used with the private
> agreement of Thomas.


I'd assumed not, but maybe it gives a way out...

gnuplot predates sourceforge and all the other hosts of open-source
projects.

If Thomas has (or will) sanction the cvs on sourceforce, then that
gives us a working definition of which is the official master set of
sources for gnuplot. So I wonder if we can open things up a bit, yet
still prevent forking, by defining something in terms of that CVS.

ie a released version of the gnuplot sources corresponds to a labelled
version in cvs, Modifications can only be distribed in the form of
patches to a specific labelled version. etc, etc.


Hmm - it may not help if it ends up that only Thomas can do the
labelling :-(  Maybe only he can label a major release, but the
maintiners can independently label a minor release ?



Not sure how that can be put into legalese, but...




dd
--=20
Dave Denholm              <dde...@es...>       http://www.esmertec=
.com