must send modifications license acceptable?

Patrice Dumas pertusus at free.fr
Sat Aug 25 17:07:53 UTC 2007


Hello,

In TeX Live there are at least 2 licenses with the obligation to send
modifications:
 *   This is dvips, a freely redistributable PostScript driver
 *   for dvi files.  It is (C) Copyright 1986-2004 by Tomas Rokicki.
 *   You may modify and use this program to your heart's content,
 *   so long as you send modifications to Tomas Rokicki.  It can
 *   be included in any distribution, commercial or otherwise, so
 *   long as the banner string defined below is not modified (except
 *   for the version number) and this banner is printed on program
 *   invocation, or can be printed on program invocation with the -?
 *   option.

For makeindex there is a rather classical license with:
"All modified versions should be reported back to the author."

There is a similar clause, with an additional condition, that the
assent of the copyright holders should be asked for in the 
Academic Free License which is considered to be free:
http://opensource.org/licenses/academic.php

9. Acceptance and Termination. ............
   If You distribute or communicate copies of the Original Work or a
   Derivative Work, You must make a reasonable effort under the
   circumstances to obtain the express assent of recipients to the terms of
   this License.


I guess that this is considered to be free enough for Fedora, still it 
seems to me that these license should be considered special, since a 
patch cannot be distributed in fedora without contacting somebody, and 
therefore the fedora contributors must be aware of these conditions
before touching the package. In the first 2 cases it is not that 
problematic, since the change can be made without prior contact, but for 
the AFL this could be very problematic, delay and complicate changes.


Lastly it seems to me that similar clauses renders the license GPL
incompatible. Am I wrong?

--
Pat




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