Re: ncurses licensing questions

[Thomas Dickey]

On Tue, 8 May 2007, Daniel Drake wrote:

> Hi,
>
> For reference, here's the ncurses license:
...

> I have some questions about binary distribution. I'm working under the
> assumption that compiling the ncurses source files into an ELF dynamic
> shared object still constitutes as "the Software" or a copy of it.

I'm interested to see what address@hidden has to say.  But my 
understanding is that binary distribution in a strict sense does not 
require the copyright notice to be included.  Binaries might be runtime 
only (the case we're talking about here) or development libraries, which 
would include header-files (which have the copyright notice).

> The license states that the copryight and permission notices shall be
> included in the software. What does this mean?

> From a practical standpoint, the license is part of (almost) every source
file.  So I've interpreted that wording to mean that the license wouldn't
be removed from any source file (or if "substantial" use were made in a 
new work, then the license of the borrowed text would be noted.

> I note that with a standard out-of-the-box compile, the license text
> does not get included in the final libncurses.so.5 binary. Is
> distributing such a binary regarded as a violation of the license?

I think not.  Some packagers have supporting documentation which
includes the license text.

> Would including a printed copy of the license terms in the documentation
> satisfy the licensing terms? The documentation is still a part of the
> overall system.

That sounds good.  The documentation has copyrights embedded which are
not necessarily visible to the user.

(I'm not a lawyer ;-)

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net