Re: PDFlib Lite vs. the gnuplot Copyright license

[Daniel J S. <dan...@ie...>]

Hans-Bernhard Broeker wrote:

>On Tue, 13 Apr 2004, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
>
>  
>
>>No "set term pdf" then?  Bummer.  At the OSI site are a couple dozen 
>>licenses that could be chosen and applied without further review; at 
>>least, I think that is what they are saying. 
>>    
>>
>
>Except that's not for us (the currently active group of developers) to do
>in the first place.  Changes to the license can *only* be done by the
>Copyright holders.  That's mainly Tom Williams, plus a handful of others.  
>They'ld all have to be contacted, and agree on a simultaneous change.  
>That would probably take even longer than getting the current license
>approved.
>

Ah.

>>What is it about Gnuplot in philosophy that varies from licenses 
>>currently out there?  Some core principle?  
>>    
>>
>
>gnuplot's license is quite ancient.  It's been around longer than just
>about all the others you'll find in OSI's list except the big 4 (BSD, MIT,
>GPL and LGPL).  Originally it was rather restrictive, like the Minix
>license in that you weren't allowed to distributed binaries from modified
>source, nor even modified sources themselves.  I.e. you were supposed to
>distribute all mods as patches to the "official" source code.
>
>We convinced Tom Williams as of 3.7 to drop the "no distribution of
>binaries from modified sources" clause, but the "no distribution of
>modified sources" one still stands.
>
>Most of us would probably welcome a move to GPL, but that apparently won't
>happen.
>
>  
>
>>Does it pay to look through the list of approved licenses to see if
>>there is something that closely matches Gnuplot's "Copyright" file?
>>    
>>
>
>It may, but I for one won't have time to do it.
>

Well, it looks like this would have to be done anyway as part of the 
approval process.  (Must tell the approval discussion list which of the 
already approved licenses are closest to yours and what about yours is 
different.)

Dan