[GRASS5] license question

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 12:17:08PM +0200, Radim Blazek wrote:
> On Sunday 21 March 2004 09:29, Hamish wrote:
> > grass/src/general/init/license.txt
> > and
> > grass51/lib/init/license.txt
> >
> > state:
> > "Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS) is Copyright,
> > 1999-2004 by the GRASS Development Team, and licensed under terms of the
> > GNU General Public License (GPL)."
> >
> > Should that specifically say GPL version 2?
> >
> > The COPYING files do; they also say:
> >
> > "You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
> > along with this program; if not, write to ..."
> 
> But it also says:
> 
>  "Parts of GRASS are not copyright by the GRASS development team.
>   The original authors hold the copyrights and you have to abide
>   to their licensing terms where noted."
> 
> this is not quite clear to me. 
> 
> Some parts have less restrictions, for example
> grass51/lib/external/bwidget (LGPL)
> grass/src/libes/bwidget (LGPL)
> grass51/lib/external/shapelib (MIT/X, LGPL)
> grass/src/libes/vect32_64/shapelib-1.2.8 (MIT/X, LGPL)
> 
> We redistribute those libs as GPL, is it true? 

When we redistribute them as part a full system of binaries, we do.
That is a bit tricky, we do not do it to the sources,
as everybody can also get them under GNU LGPL.
Also see http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLModuleLicense

So infact the sources can be used as GNU LGPL and GNU GPL.

> Is it OK if we don't change their license statement? 

Yes.
The user with the GRASS binaries gets both.

> Or should we add a note about other licenses to COPYING etc.?

It would be nice to have an overview somewhere.
All software is redistributable under the GNU GPL to our best
knowledge (see below) so we are probably not required
to keep such an overview.

> Are there pieces of the code with more restrictions than GPL?

We did a best effort approach to ensure that this is not the case.
I searched for the string "copyright" and some others
to identify all sections that could be problematic a few years back.
Because GRASS is a huge haystack, 
the best effort approach was pragmatic to not get
completely stuck in licensing issues, but it is not a proof.
It is impossible to prove this anyway.

> In 5.7 I used also grass51/lib/form/html_library.tcl 
> ( grass51/lib/form/license.terms ), the code may be redistributed
> for free, but I am not sure if it may be redistributed as GPL.
> Can you look at it Bernhard?

The main part reads like:

	The authors hereby grant permission to use, copy, modify,
	distribute, and license this software and its documentation for any
	purpose, provided that existing copyright notices are retained in
	all copies and that this notice is included verbatim in any
	distributions. No written agreement, license, or royalty fee is
	required for any of the authorized uses.  Modifications to this
	software may be copyrighted by their authors and need not follow the
	licensing terms described here, provided that the new terms are
	clearly indicated on the first page of each file where they apply.

This seems to be a non-protecting Free Software license
compatible with the GNU GPL.
Note it is very close in wording to the 
	Standard ML of New Jersey Copyright License.
listed at http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html

Best,
	Bernhard
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