Re: Is this copyright/license agreement Octave-compatible

[John W. Eaton]

On 27-Nov-2007, Joshua Rigler wrote:

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

That is a separate issue from the "may be sold for profit under
certain conditions", and anyway, a requirement to retain the license
statement is already a condition of the GPL, so it is not in any way
an additional requirement.

| 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),

I think they (and anyone else who distributes code freely without
including a clear statement of the license in every substantial source
file) should fix that...

| 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.

With that clause, I think the license is clearly incompatible with the
GPL.

jwe