Re: [AD] giftware license

[Elias Pschernig <elias@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 00:31 +0200, Michal Molhanec wrote:
>     Hello all,
> because I think the debate about Allegro licence was useful and made 
> some things clearer I offer you this small documentation patch. Instead 
> of modifying the licence it adds licence mini-FAQ. Somebody with good 
> English should correct it :-).
> 

Allegro already has a FAQ - so I think a good place for this would be in
the FAQ, under a section "license". There could be a reference to that
FAQ section at the point where you added it in readme._tx.

> +@@   Does the licence mean that Allegro is public domain?
> +      No. Every Allegro contributor holds its copyright for the code he or
> +      she wrote.

Maybe we should explain that some more. It sounds somehow dangerous that
every contributor holds copyright.. what rights exactly does it give
them to the code they contributed?

> +@@   Is Allegro compatible with licence XXX (e.g. GPL) ?
> +      As Allegro licence has no restrictions on use you can combine it with
> +      any licence you want. You only cannot distribute it as a part of
> +      public domain program.

As someone else noted - that last point shouldn't be there I guess. To
be honest, I have no idea if Allegro isn't actually public domain, given
its license (or else, what would be the difference?) You can do anything
with both.. (I feel, that giftware thread didn't actually make me that
much more knowledgeable about licenses :P)

I think, also a related question would be good:

Is Allegro open source (OSI) compatible?

See the previous question. Since Allegro is compatible with about any
license, it also is ISO compatible. It clearly is compatible to all the
points in the OSD (open source definition). You can search the OSI
mailing list for "Allegro" to see that OSI shares this view. (OSI
officials still were reluctant to consider it for approval though and
suggested to use a more restrictive license like MIT instead.)

-- 
Elias Pschernig