Michael Dickson writes:
On Tue, 2004-01-06 at 18:57, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
Antonio Querubin writes:
Ok, for discussion sake here's the remainder of the copyright. If anybody spots any red flags in there perhaps they could point it out.
[ … ]
(5) the University of Washington may make modifications to the Distribution that are substantially similar to modified versions of the Distribution, and may make, use, sell, copy, distribute, publicly display, and perform such modifications, including making such modifications available under this or other licenses, without obligation or restriction;
That's the red flag right there. This clause makes UW-IMAP's license incompatible with the GPL.
So what. There are other valid opensource licenses. This is actually mostly a mute point since redhat controls the distribution and they determine what they are comfortable including from a licensing perspective.
The University of Washington reserves the right to acquire any changes you've made to their software, and use it for their own purposes and release it under other licenses.
This doesn't say that.
What part of “including making such modifications available under this or other licenses, without obligation or restriction” doesn't say that?
It simply says that if they like something a
distributor did they can copy the functionality and resdistribute it.
Not only that, they can take it and release it under "other licenses", meaning that after you've invested a lot of your own time making extensive contributions to the UW server, bringing a lot of value-added functionality, they can simply take their toys with them, cease distributing UW-IMAP's source code, and instead launch a commercial product, based partially on your work, without any obligations to you.
This is one of the things that the GPL precisely prevents.
It doesn't imply they own local changes at all.
They automatically own any patches or improvements that you publish. The wording is very plain.
In fact other points in
the license specifically address that.
What other points?
This has more in common with Microsoft's Shared Source license, rather than any OSI-approved license. The only substantive difference is that you do not have to pay $100,000 to the University of Washington in order to obtain the source code.
IMHO this is nothing like the M$ SSL. Its a pretty open, permissive license. Unfortunately redhat apparently doesn't agree so if I want pine I'll have to get it and install it myself. No biggie. But lets not paint the picture to make the University of Washington bad guys. I don't see them that way.
They are not "bad guys", but I agree that the UW-IMAP server's licensing is not compatible with the Fedora project (although this was originally a pine thread, it drifted to the server's license, however note that pine's license is even more incompatible).