[Fedora-legal-list] Critical Mass Modula-3 license

[Jerry James]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Tom "spot" Callaway
<tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> Same license, different copyright holders. The license is non-free. One
> of the copyright holders (Critical Mass) now seems to be called IGEN
> Corporation, so they might be reachable to resolve the licensing issue.
> The other (Digital Electronics Corp) is now HP, but I wouldn't even know
> where within HP to start asking them about relicensing that code.
>
> The main problem is this clause:
>
>    LICENSEE hereby grants to CRITICAL MASS a
>    non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty free right to use,
>    modify, reproduce and distribute with the right to sublicense at
>    any tier, any improvements, enhancements, extensions, or
>    modifications that LICENSEE make to SOFTWARE, provided such are
>    returned to CRITICAL MASS by LICENSEE.
>
> It is unclear, but RH Legal feels that this means that in order to
> use/modify/redistribute this code, you need to send all changes back to
> the copyright holder (which is very murky, given that the copyright has
> changed hands several times for both listed copyright holders).
>
> If the requirement to "return" changes to the copyright holder was
> waived, the license might be acceptable. Let me know if you want me to
> reach out to IGEN and HP on this.
>
> ~spot

Thanks, spot.  I'm not sure where to go with this.  I've located
several Modula-3 compilers, but every single one of them is ultimately
derived from the DEC implementation, so they will all have this
headache.  I'm going to have to decide whether I'm really comfortable
trying to support a Modula-3 compiler in Fedora.  Or I can see if
there is any possibility of removing or replacing the Modula-3
component for the tool I'm ultimately interested in.  Don't bother
doing anything further with this unless I bring it back up.

Thank you,
-- 
Jerry James
http://www.jamezone.org/