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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


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