INN licensing change

bill davidsen davidsen at tmr.com
Mon Jan 26 22:43:38 UTC 2004


In article <87isiziyvd.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu>,
Russ Allbery  <rra at stanford.edu> wrote:

| As of January 1st, the Internet Software Consortium changed its name to
| the Internet Systems Consortium, Inc., and adopted a new license for its
| code.  I took advantage of the opportunity to discuss INN's license with
| Paul Vixie and Rich Salz, and am pleased to announce that we are dropping
| the advertising clause from INN's license.

Why? (The name change, not the license change)
| 
| Note that INN does not do copyright assignment, so license changes are
| mildly murky.  To be completely legally rigorous, we would need to ask
| every contributor whether they were willing to relicense their changes.
| However, since the advertising clause only named ISC, and since all I ever
| ask contributors is whether they're willing to have their code distributed
| as part of INN, I feel fairly confident and comfortable with making this
| sort of unilateral change.  That being said, if anyone anticipates any
| problems with this sort of change, please let me know.

I can't sign with this mailer, but consider me in agreement to any
patches and/or contrib software being included in INN.
| 
| Just for the record, I am relicensing all changes I personally have ever
| made to INN under the new license.
| 
| The new copyright and license for INN is:
                [... available elsewhere ...]
| (Note that this license phrasing is standard across ISC products, but
| according to the University of Washington permits the idiotic twisting of
| the English language that prevents Debian from distributing Pine.  I
| personally think one has to strain the English language beyond belief to
| read the above license as only permitting distribution of unmodified
| copies, and that is certainly not the intention, but if anyone thinks that
| will be a problem I'll take it up with Paul.)

I have released some software like that (not INN-related) requiring
distribution of original source and patches with any modified binaries.
I regard it as a good CYA practice for software like backups which hurt
if they fail.
-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.


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