On Thu, 3 Jan 2013, Heiki "Repentinus" Ojasild wrote:
Dear Pascal and malc,
On 26 December 2012 19:02, Pascal Wittmann mail@pascal-wittmann.de wrote:
I do not feel really competent in licensing things, so I think it would the best (in case both of you are still interested) if you would communicate directly to clarify this. But in my opinion the list that malc provided below would be sufficient, if one could access it on the project page.
PDFreaders.org team would be delighted to have another free reader listed; however, the licensing must be both clear and concise; furthermore, the licensing must be explained in a notice accompanying the software.
In addition, based on malc's response, the software, especially if distributed in binary form, should be licensed as a whole and under a Free Software licence. A list of such licences can be found at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html, a website operated by the Free Software Foundation. The list of licences that can be found at http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical should also do; however, please prefer 'Free Software' over 'Open Source' in your marketing. (RMS from our sister FSF explains the reasons at https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html.)
I, personally, do not distribute binary copies, if i did it would have been GPL simply because MuPDF (the library used to turn various documents) into pixmaps is licensed under it, if just adding a text that the combined binary (which, again, i do not make) is bound by the GPL would be enough, that i can do.
If you are serious about this and need help with licensing, then you need to gather licences for all the parts. Following that, you can either ask FSF's licensing people https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#LicensingEmailAddress for help; or, should you so desire, we might solicit some advice for you from FSFE Legal.
I hope we have been able to provide you with some assistance, and I regret that we cannot be any laxer. However, considering the current copyright climate and the ultimate goal of ensuring the liberty of software users, we are unable to relent.
On 12/09/2012 10:24 PM, malc wrote:
On Sun, 9 Dec 2012, Pascal Wittmann wrote:
Hi,
with this email I forward you the answer of the pdfreaders.org team. They insist on making the licence explicit. So if you like the idea of having llpp listed on pdfreaders.org you should probably make this explicit (with a licence file or something similar). Of course doing this would not be a guarantee to be added, but rather requirement.
I like the idea, and thank you for pursuing it, i'm not to keen on boilerplate though:
glfont.c - written by Tor Andersson no idea what the terms are (you'd have to ask him, i was unsuccessful in my attempts) keysym2ucs.c - Markus G. Kuhn licence in the header link.c - some bits and pieces taken from mupdf sources parser.ml - based on Tor Andresson's muxps XML (no code shared) main.ml - makechekers function is based on the Issac Trotts C to OCaml conversion of Red Book(?) code
The rest (i believe) was written from scratch.
I hope i was diligent enough and all the foreign influences are properly attributed. And slapping one licence on all of this doesn't seem right to me, what would it look like?
[..snip..]
Sincerely yours,