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
=======================================================================