I'm chasing down dependency chains for a program analysis tool that I'd like to see in Fedora. At the bottom of one chain, I found a component that is written in Modula-3! The documentation for that component states that program development and testing has been done with the Critical Mass Modula-3 compiler, which is distributed under 2 licenses:
http://www.opencm3.com/COPYRIGHT-CMASS http://www.opencm3.com/COPYRIGHT-DEC
Are those licenses acceptable for Fedora? (Not that I'm at all sure I want to try to maintain a Modula-3 package, but if the licenses are okay, I'll give it a shot.)
Thanks,
On 09/16/2009 02:49 PM, Jerry James wrote:
I'm chasing down dependency chains for a program analysis tool that I'd like to see in Fedora. At the bottom of one chain, I found a component that is written in Modula-3! The documentation for that component states that program development and testing has been done with the Critical Mass Modula-3 compiler, which is distributed under 2 licenses:
http://www.opencm3.com/COPYRIGHT-CMASS http://www.opencm3.com/COPYRIGHT-DEC
Are those licenses acceptable for Fedora? (Not that I'm at all sure I want to try to maintain a Modula-3 package, but if the licenses are okay, I'll give it a shot.)
Same license, different copyright holders. The license is non-free. One of the copyright holders (Critical Mass) now seems to be called IGEN Corporation, so they might be reachable to resolve the licensing issue. The other (Digital Electronics Corp) is now HP, but I wouldn't even know where within HP to start asking them about relicensing that code.
The main problem is this clause:
LICENSEE hereby grants to CRITICAL MASS a non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty free right to use, modify, reproduce and distribute with the right to sublicense at any tier, any improvements, enhancements, extensions, or modifications that LICENSEE make to SOFTWARE, provided such are returned to CRITICAL MASS by LICENSEE.
It is unclear, but RH Legal feels that this means that in order to use/modify/redistribute this code, you need to send all changes back to the copyright holder (which is very murky, given that the copyright has changed hands several times for both listed copyright holders).
If the requirement to "return" changes to the copyright holder was waived, the license might be acceptable. Let me know if you want me to reach out to IGEN and HP on this.
~spot
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Tom "spot" Callaway tcallawa@redhat.com wrote:
Same license, different copyright holders. The license is non-free. One of the copyright holders (Critical Mass) now seems to be called IGEN Corporation, so they might be reachable to resolve the licensing issue. The other (Digital Electronics Corp) is now HP, but I wouldn't even know where within HP to start asking them about relicensing that code.
The main problem is this clause:
LICENSEE hereby grants to CRITICAL MASS a non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty free right to use, modify, reproduce and distribute with the right to sublicense at any tier, any improvements, enhancements, extensions, or modifications that LICENSEE make to SOFTWARE, provided such are returned to CRITICAL MASS by LICENSEE.
It is unclear, but RH Legal feels that this means that in order to use/modify/redistribute this code, you need to send all changes back to the copyright holder (which is very murky, given that the copyright has changed hands several times for both listed copyright holders).
If the requirement to "return" changes to the copyright holder was waived, the license might be acceptable. Let me know if you want me to reach out to IGEN and HP on this.
~spot
Thanks, spot. I'm not sure where to go with this. I've located several Modula-3 compilers, but every single one of them is ultimately derived from the DEC implementation, so they will all have this headache. I'm going to have to decide whether I'm really comfortable trying to support a Modula-3 compiler in Fedora. Or I can see if there is any possibility of removing or replacing the Modula-3 component for the tool I'm ultimately interested in. Don't bother doing anything further with this unless I bring it back up.
Thank you,
-
Jerry James -
Tom Callaway