Ticket #1 (closed task: fixed)
Clarify licence text
| Reported by: | rossb | Owned by: | rossb |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | critical | Milestone: | V19-PREVIEW1 |
| Component: | global | Version: | 2.0 |
| Keywords: | license | Cc: |
Description
There have been ongoing problems with our modified MIT license. Every so often Debian contributors complain that our license is not really free and threaten to remove PortAudio from Debian. In spite of our best attempts to defend our position I believe that standing our ground is not worth the bad publicity it has/is causing us. We stand to gain credibility by adopting a standard open source license.
The current PortAudio license is the MIT license: http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
With the following clause added:
Any person wishing to distribute modifications to the Software is requested to send the modifications to the original developer so that they can be incorporated into the canonical version. <<<
See our full license and explanation here: http://www.portaudio.com/license.html
I would like to revert to the MIT license, but to still include our clause in a non-binding/non-license section of the source file header and on the website (just to assert the presence of our development community) as follows:
/* ...Module description... * * Based on the Open Source API proposed by Ross Bencina * Copyright (c) 1999-2002 Ross Bencina, Phil Burk * * Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining * a copy of this software and associated documentation files * (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, * including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, * publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, * and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, * subject to the following conditions: * * The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be * included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. * * THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, * EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF * MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. * IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR * ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF * CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION * WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. */
/* * The text above constitutes the entire PortAudio license, however * the PortAudio community makes the following non-binding requests: * * Any person wishing to distribute modifications to the Software is * requested to send the modifications to the original developer so that * they can be incorporated into the canonical version. We also request * that these non-binding requests be included along with the official * license. */
Note that we are not _requiring_ our non-binding text to be included, and we are explicitly stating that it is not part of the license. I think this reflects our intent to maintain the community spirit of PortAudio.
This change would be made before the V19 release (for the v19-devel branch and all future development (not for the V18 patch branch where there are probably more untracable contributors).
