Artifact a2b9f9cb5e37a89c28d9b5dbb47bbdd5eb0557f665a3fba91bfaf44cd7104d6d:
- Executable file
r37/lisp/csl/cslbase/0rationale
— part of check-in
[f2fda60abd]
at
2011-09-02 18:13:33
on branch master
— Some historical releases purely for archival purposes
git-svn-id: https://svn.code.sf.net/p/reduce-algebra/code/trunk/historical@1375 2bfe0521-f11c-4a00-b80e-6202646ff360 (user: arthurcnorman@users.sourceforge.net, size: 4649) [annotate] [blame] [check-ins using] [more...]
- Executable file
r38/lisp/csl/cslbase/0rationale
— part of check-in
[f2fda60abd]
at
2011-09-02 18:13:33
on branch master
— Some historical releases purely for archival purposes
git-svn-id: https://svn.code.sf.net/p/reduce-algebra/code/trunk/historical@1375 2bfe0521-f11c-4a00-b80e-6202646ff360 (user: arthurcnorman@users.sourceforge.net, size: 4649) [annotate] [blame] [check-ins using]
Rationale ========= This license permits unrestricted use of the material covered if it is not redistributed outside the recipient's organisation, subject to acceptance of the disclaimer of liability. Redistribution in full or in part, or creation of derivative works is permitted including the use of all or part of the material in a commercial package. The first three clauses that control redistribution follow the well- established BSD license. The fourth clause is there because Codemist developed this code and still maintains version of it in different contexts as commercial products. Despite this Codemist wishes to make a version of the code available to the community: initially to support the Axiom algebra system but with the possibility of whatever other uses people find for it, commercial or otherwise. The first part (making modified source code available to Codemist) would automatically be satisfied if you made your modifications generally public by, for instance, putting them on a web page somewhere or contributing them to a publicly accessible cvs repository: it could also be satisfied by e-mailing consolidated updates to Codemist. The requirement should thus only feel onerous if you are minded to incorporate this code in a non-open project: in such cases Codemist, in return for having made the code available to start with, insists that it receives any updates or upgrades to its code that you create. Codemist does not make any demands at all with regard to the larger body of non-open code that gets parts of this code incorporated into it. The next part gives Codemist the right to use corrections, updates and developments of this code in any way it chooses. This can include making these publicly available, and it can also include merging them into the non-open project from which this one derives, without watering down the proprietary nature of that version in any way at all. Thus the Codemist commercial project may benefit from updates contributed this way. But if contributors choose to make their updates fully public (as they are permitted to under this license) everybody else can benefit from all the updates too. The final part demands that contributors do not return to Codemist anything that they do not have sufficient rights to. Note that (as is the case with all variants on the BSD license) this means that material subject to the GPL may not be merged in with this material and then re-circulated, since in such a case the GPL would lay claim to the entire package (even if only one line of GPL code had been inserted), and that would impose additional constraints on recipients that are not acceptable under this license. As I understand the BSD and GNU licenses this difficulty whereby code made publicly available at no charge and with full permission to modify can be under one or other license but material from one tradition may not be incorporated into the other (in either direction) is a generic one in the open source community and is not special or specific to this particular instance. In a significant number of cases it can be overcome by keeping the distinctly-licensed code bodies slightly at arm's length: for instance letting one load the other as a dynamic library or plug-in or forming a remote-procedure interface can leave the two units having a clear separate identity. When part or all of the code licensed here is incorporated into a distinct work Codemist's intent is not to lay claim to rights to the larger work as a whole: it just assert rights over the changes to the Codemist software developed in the process of making it fit to be embedded in the new context. None of this gives Codemist (or anybody else) exclusive rights to changes. The license permits (and Codemist encourages) those who make changes to distribute the whole of their work in source form thus giving everybody (not just Codemist) rights to make commercial or non-commercial use of everything. Since everybody has access to this code anybody who feels able to extend and support it for themselves does not need anything more. However anybody thinking of using significant chunks of it in a commercial product might like to consider whether some consultancy support from Codemist or discussions about any related but distinct Codemist technology would be in their interests. acn@codemist.co.uk Arthur Norman. Codemist Ltd. 2002 =======================================================================