Re: Is this copyright/license agreement Octave-compatible

[Joshua Rigler]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 18-Nov-2007, Josh Rigler wrote:
>
> | Just to be clear, the license states that it *can* be sold for profit, 
> | with caveats that are, practically speaking, no more restrictive than 
> | other software licenses that are widely accepted as GPL compatible 
> | (e.g., NetCDF or HDF).
>
> What are the restrictions in the HDF or NetCDF licenses?
>
> jwe

The URLs to the respective licenses are here:

  http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HDF5/doc/Copyright.html

...and here:

  http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/copyright.html

The restrictions are simply that the license text, including any 
disclaimers and citation requirements, must be kept intact in the 
distributed code.

The point I was trying to make about CDF was that all that is required 
of someone who wants to distribute the source code is that they insert 
the CDF license text into the source code (oddly, none of their source 
code actually includes the license in it, only their web page), and that 
the source code be part of a "substantive product", if and only if the 
product is sold for profit.

The *only* added restriction associated with CDF is the ambiguous 
"substantive product" stipulation, and I am not really willing to argue 
the legal meaning of this phrase.  Nor am I willing to make yet another 
attempt to change the minds of the CDF developers at NASA about the text 
of their license.  So, unless you, and all of Octave's main developers, 
are amenable to interpreting the phrase "substantive product" in a very 
broad sense (and I certainly wouldn't fault you for not doing so), there 
is little point in pursuing this issue further.

-EJR