Dear Fons, Dear Rene, Dear Valerie,
I would like to package root v2 for the Debian Linux Distribution.
Before this I have to check the license conditions, because the Debian
project wants to make sure, that it can legally distribute und modify
the software it provides and I am rather unhappy that you use "non-free
licenses"(*) on most of the software.
Most of the Root System prohibits commercial use.
More than 250 files have:
// Copyright (C) 1996 CodeCERN. All rights reserved.
without any license conditions mentioned.
Some have two licenses which want to apply contradicting conditions:
GUI_GButton.cxx, GUI_GCanvas.cxx, GUI_GClient.cxx, GUI_GComboBox.cxx,
GUI_GDimension.cxx, GUI_GFSComboBox.cxx, GUI_GFSContainer.cxx,
GUI_GFrame.cxx, GUI_GIcon.cxx, GUI_GLabel.cxx, GUI_GLayout.cxx,
GUI_GListBox.cxx, GUI_GListTree.cxx, GUI_GListView.cxx, GUI_GMenu.cxx,
GUI_GMimeTypes.cxx, GUI_GMsgBox.cxx, GUI_GObject.cxx,
GUI_GPicture.cxx, GUI_GScrollBar.cxx, GUI_GSlider.cxx,
GUI_GStatusBar.cxx, GUI_GString.cxx, GUI_GTab.cxx, GUI_GText.cxx,
GUI_GTextBuffer.cxx, GUI_GTextEntry.cxx, GUI_GTextView.cxx,
GUI_GToolBar.cxx, GUI_GToolTip.cxx, GUI_GWidget.cxx and
GUI_GWindow.cxx say:
* Copyright(c) 1995-1998, The ROOT System, All rights reserved. *
* Authors: Rene Brun, Nenad Buncic, Valery Fine, Fons Rademakers. *
and
This source is based on Xclass95, a Win95-looking GUI toolkit.
Copyright (C) 1996, 1997 David Barth, Ricky Ralston, Hector Peraza.
the latter place it under GPL, which then makes derived work GPL. So
use in commercial environments is allowed for this files --- in
contrary to the license of the former.
And finally there is PYTHIA_Pythia.cxx with
* Copyright(c) 1995-1998, The ROOT System, All rights reserved. *
* Authors: Rene Brun, Nenad Buncic, Valery Fine, Fons Rademakers. *
and
//** !! !! Copyright Torbjorn Sjostrand **
//** !! and CERN, Geneva 1993 **
the latter says nothing about licenses, so modifications are prohibited...
There is one file having a DJ Delorie copyright, but I can`t find the
copying.dj file it says it is accompanied (but that's not that hard,
because it seems to be windows stuff).
And another file having (C) by the Regents of California and DJ
Delorie but no statment is there about modifications and you have to
display an advertising notice (modified BSD license?).
And last but not least you seem to use the ZIP algorithms, which are
patented by compuserve (Do you have to pay money, if you use
the encryption algorithms in a commercial environment?). The ZIP_*
files (up to ZIP_inflate.c, which is public domain) are
Copyright (C) 1990-1993 Mark Adler, Richard B. Wales, Jean-loup Gailly,
Kai Uwe Rommel and Igor Mandrichenko.
they prohibit selling: "that it is not sold for profit" and modifications.
In addition in LinuxJournal #51 you state:
"The current version can be used and distributed freely as long as
proper credit is given and copyrigth notices are maintained. For
commercial use, the authors would like to be notified."
But as long as you do not allow commercial use in the license
conditions, commercial use is in fact prohibited, regardless what you state in
LinuxJournal.
In addition if modifications were allowed, it would be no problem to
distribute root as a Debian package on the Debian archive network. If
you use ZIP algorithms for encoding and/or modifications are
prohibited (or commercial use is prohibited), Debian has to distribute
it as non-free, which means it will not be included in Debian CD
Distributions.
I now kindly want to ask you if it might be possible to sort this out?
And maybe it is even possible to use a "free" compression algorithm and
allow modifications?
Thanks for the great work. root really has a great concept and has the
potential to be very powerful.
Jens Ritter
P.S.: I am sorry for my bad english, it is not my native tongue.
--
(*) in the Debian Free Software Guidelines sense. See:
http://www.de.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
---
Jens.Ritter@weh.rwth-aachen.de grimaldi@debian.org
KeyID: 2048/E451C639 1998/01/28
Print: 5F 3D 43 1E 24 1E CC 48 1E 05 93 3A A7 10 73 37
Hiermit untersage ich die Nutzung und Uebermittlung meiner Daten zu
Werbezwecken oder fuer die Markt- bzw. Meinungsforschung gemaess
Par. 28 Abs. 3 Bundesdatenschutzgesetz.
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