Re: Licensing question

[John Belmonte <jvb@...>]

Roberto wrote:
> We are considering switching Lua license to a standard license, but we
> cannot find a suitable one. Maybe we do not understand them, but it seems
> to us that none of the "usual" licenses cover the kind of problems we
> are having with the current license (besides the FSF sanction):
...
> - expat (or MIT) license: "The above copyright notice and this
> permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial
> portions of the Software." Again, how does that apply to binary
> (re)distribuition?

From my understanding of things, you cannot put a restriction on the 
contents of the binary (such as requiring it to contain some 
identification).  The reason is that to do so you are conflicting with 
the user's permission to "modify the software without limitation" (that 
is, remove the lines of code that produce the identification).  So the 
only way to comply with the license is to include the copyright notice 
and permission with the distribution but outside of the binary.

Apparently others are also interested in having this spelled out, 
looking at the University of Illinous OSL 
(http://opensource.org/licenses/UoI-NCSA.html).  However that license is 
also relatively new and hasn't been reviewed for GPL compatibility.


Regards,
-John


--
OpenPGP encrypted mail welcome.