[Fedora-legal-list] Legal opinion on license for EQP

[Tom Callaway]

On 01/03/2012 04:35 PM, John C. Peterson wrote:
> "But it has obtained several interesting results, and we have decided
> to make it available (including the source code) to everyone, with no
> restrictions (and of course no warranty)."
> 
> The page itself is here: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~mccune/eqp/
> 
> Unfortunately, the source code tarball itself contains nothing to
> clarify further the copyright, license terms. Obviously, the path of
> least resistance would be to contact the author for clarification.

IMHO, this is not sufficient to constitute a Free Software License,
notably, because there is no clear permission to modify in the above
statement. (Although it says "with no restrictions", the way that
copyright law works in the US is that the copyright holder must
explicitly grant rights which are not offered by default, so in saying
that there are no restrictions, they are merely stating that the
copyright holder is not applying any restrictions above and beyond what
is automatically granted by 17 U.S.C.)

I think contacting ANL would be the next step if you wished to pursue
resolving this licensing issue.

~tom

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