[pooma-dev] Open-Source licensing

Richard Guenther rguenth at tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de
Tue Jul 6 20:10:16 UTC 2004


John H.Hall wrote:
> Gang:
> I have now been asked officially by Jeff Brown (LANL CCS-DO) to get 
> these licensing issues straightened out which makes it official work 
> instead of a part-time hobby. So I need to know which packages y'all 
> want transferred out. I prefer the BSD license myself of the existing 
> licenses out there but I am open to debate on this issue. So here is 
> what I seem to remember.
> 
> We want:
> 
> Cheetah
> Pete
> Pooma R1 and R2 (R1 for compatibility issues)
> 
> from the ACL.
> 
> (Someone needs to remind me what is wrong with the license R2 was taken 
> out under so I don't go down the same path.)

I think there was nothing "wrong" per se, but find the following wording 
confusing:

"The U.S. Government has rights to use, reproduce, and distribute this 
SOFTWARE. The public may copy, distribute, prepare derivative works and 
publicly display this SOFTWARE without charge, provided that this Notice 
and any statement of authorship are reproduced on all copies."

It tells about rights for "using" for the U.S. Government, but not for 
the public (that gets rights to "display" - whatever this is).

I would go for a 2-clause BSD license, because we're so familiar with it.

Richard.



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