pine RPM and IPv6 for imapd

[Sam Varshavchik]

Michael Dickson writes:

> On Tue, 2004-01-06 at 18:57, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
>> Antonio Querubin writes:
>> 
>> > Ok, for discussion sake here's the remainder of the copyright.  If anybody
>> > spots any red flags in there perhaps they could point it out.
>> 
>> [ … ]
>> 
>> > (5) the University of Washington may make modifications to the
>> > Distribution that are substantially similar to modified versions of
>> > the Distribution, and may make, use, sell, copy, distribute, publicly
>> > display, and perform such modifications, including making such
>> > modifications available under this or other licenses, without
>> > obligation or restriction;
>> 
>> That's the red flag right there.  This clause makes UW-IMAP's license 
>> incompatible with the GPL.
> 
> So what.  There are other valid opensource licenses.  This is actually
> mostly a mute point since redhat controls the distribution and they
> determine what they are comfortable including from a licensing
> perspective. 
> 
>> The University of Washington reserves the right to acquire any changes 
>> you've made to their software, and use it for their own purposes and release 
>> it under other licenses.
> 
> This doesn't say that.

What part of “including making such modifications available under this or 
other licenses, without obligation or restriction” doesn't say that?

>                         It simply says that if they like something a
> distributor did they can copy the functionality and resdistribute it. 

Not only that, they can take it and release it under "other licenses", 
meaning that after you've invested a lot of your own time making extensive 
contributions to the UW server, bringing a lot of value-added functionality, 
they can simply take their toys with them, cease distributing UW-IMAP's 
source code, and instead launch a commercial product, based partially on 
your work, without any obligations to you.

This is one of the things that the GPL precisely prevents.

> It doesn't imply they own local changes at all.

They automatically own any patches or improvements that you publish.  The 
wording is very plain.

>                                                  In fact other points in
> the license specifically address that.  

What other points?

>> This has more in common with Microsoft's Shared Source license, rather than 
>> any OSI-approved license.  The only substantive difference is that you do 
>> not have to pay $100,000 to the University of Washington in order to obtain 
>> the source code.
> 
> IMHO this is nothing like the M$ SSL. Its a pretty open, permissive
> license.  Unfortunately redhat apparently doesn't agree so if I want
> pine I'll have to get it and install it myself.  No biggie.  But lets
> not paint the picture to make the University of Washington bad guys.  I
> don't see them that way.

They are not "bad guys", but I agree that the UW-IMAP server's licensing is 
not compatible with the Fedora project (although this was originally a pine 
thread, it drifted to the server's license, however note that pine's license 
is even more incompatible).


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/attachments/20040106/0f21274f/attachment.sig>