My open tickets in bugzilla.fedora.us

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sun, 06 Feb 2005 19:29:36 -1000, Warren Togami wrote:

> I looked into your two packages and the Bugzilla history.  Some comments 
> below.
> 
> Gianluca Sforna wrote:
> > I have a couple of pending package requests in bugzilla.fedora.us:
> > https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2329
> 
> IANAL, but the license issues surrounding this software are confusing 
> and possibly problematic.
> 
> http://www.tecn.upf.es/openMOIV/openmoiv/license.html
> "Because OpenMOIV is a derived product of  Molecular Inventor (you can 
> consider OpenMOIV as a modification of Molecular Inventor), you need to 
> accept two licenses in order to use it: the original license from 
> Silicon Graphics (applicable to the initial source code) and the 
> GNU/LGPL license for our modifications and improvements."
> 
> "Molecular Inventor License" has language like "non-transferable and 
> non-exclusive" and "Licensee shall not assign or otherwise transfer its 
> rights or obligations under this License Agreement without the prior 
> written consent..."  To my non-lawyer eyes, this sounds contradictory to 
> the GPL or LGPL, where it is very important that rights are transferrable.
> 
> It is one thing to dual-license software, the copyright holder can 
> release software under different licenses, however if OpenMOIV 
> explicitly says that you must accept BOTH licenses, then it sounds 
> horribly problematic.  However...
> 
> http://oss.sgi.com/projects/inventor/license.html
> http://freshmeat.net/projects/openinventor/
> 
>  From the looks of it though, here SGI explicitly states "LGPL" as the 
> license for Open Inventor with no mention of the "Molecular Inventor" 
> license.  So it may be possible that OpenMOIV is just confused in their 
> licensing statement?
> 
> In any case we need to clear this up in order to move forward.  Please 
> find more information (URL's) about this situation so we can summarize 
> the legal question for submission to Red Hat's legal queue.  They will 
> give us a 'yes' or 'no'.

The Molecular Inventor pages and licence are here:

http://www.sgi.com/products/evaluation/molecular_inventor/
http://www.sgi.com/industries/sciences/chembio/resources/molinv/molinv.html
 
Here SGI links OpenMOIV, which means they are aware of it. However, the
source files itself contain the LGPL header and the clause that "all other
liences must be accepted". So, maybe there's an IANAL type of
misunderstanding in the chosen licencing scheme by either SGI or the
OpenMOIV authors. Whether they are permitted to apply the LGPL to their
derived library or whether their licencing specific page 
http://www.tecn.upf.es/openMOIV/openmoiv/license.html really tries to
restrict the LGPL is not clear. As I understand it, only to get SGI's
original Molecular Inventor source you need to accept SGI's licence.