FrobTADS Licensing

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 9/13/05, Chris Grau <chris at chrisgrau.com> wrote:
> After some discussion in the Bugzilla review request[1] and in
> #fedora-extras, it was recommended that I contact the list for advice.
> 
> The licensing for FrobTADS derives from the licensing for TADS v2[2] and
> TADS v3[3].  These are obviously neither OSI- nor FSF-approved licenses.
> The author has no intention of changing the license, so what I want to
> know is whether or not this package can be included in Extras.  I
> suspect not, in which case I can look into contributing it to Livna.

prohibits charging a fee for a software collection that includes the
codebase. Sounds to me this could never be on media that 3rd party
vendors like cheapbytes could offer for sale. This might not be a
problem right now... but it will be.  And such a restriction is
expressly against the OSI definition of open source.

prohibits creation of modified derivative works without written
permission. Hmm thats pretty hard to swallow. Again leaning heavily on
the OSI definition.. there really must be a way for people to make
modified works and distribute them. Either a clause that requires a
re-naming of the work, or a clause that requires that modifications be
shipped as seperate patches to be integrated at build time. Or from a
project perspective... exactly where is the line between a needed
patch and unauthorized modification? If we need to get permission to
apply a fedora specific patch to make it build...thats a big problem.

I think this package is livna bound. 

-jef"As William Shatner and Henry Rollins once said... I can't get
behind that."spaleta