[Fedora-legal-list] Question about the ACE TAO license

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On Thu, 2007-11-15 at 19:53 +0100, Sergio Pascual wrote:
> Hello, I'm planning to package ACE+TAO
> (http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html).
> 
> My question is about (of course) the license. The license text can be
> found in the following URL
> http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE-copying.html and in the source
> code. It seems a free software license to me (but I'm not an
> expert...)
> Is this license valid for fedora?

So, a few points worth making:

A few weeks ago, I decided that I would package ACE+TAO, and I came
across someone who had already done the packaging work (Ken Sedgwick). I
asked him if he would be interested in maintaining it in Fedora, and he
was, but as you've noticed, the license is an issue.

The ACE+TAO license (properly, the DOC license), has a rather unique
clause in which it asks you to completely surrender your copyright
interests in your submissions. Neither I, nor the FSF had ever seen
anything like that before, and they've been considering whether the
license is free or not since then. I've contacted the license author,
and he's willing to discuss it with the FSF, and possibly make changes
to the license, but I've not heard anything back on this.

Ken's packages are here:
http://dist.bonsai.com/ken/ace_tao_rpm/

~spot