OpenLDAP Licence v.2.6

[Free Software Foundation]

> On Mon, Jul 30, 2001 at 08:27:12PM +0200, Simo Sorce wrote:
> > 
> > On the fsf web site, in the icense list OpenLDAP Licence v 2.3 is marked as NOT
> > compatible with GPL.
> > 
> > The last release of OpenLDAP License is 2.6 and it is a bit different from 2.3
> > Do anyone know if this new version is still incompatible with GPL or not?
> 
> Don't know without checking.
> licensing at gnu.org is the right place to ask so that the page can be updated.
> (cc pointing to it).


It's better, but section 4 still needs some work:

     4. The names and trademarks of the authors and copyright holders
     must not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale,
     use or other dealing in this Software without specific, written
     prior permission.

Compare to the modified BSD license (which is compatible):

     3. The name of the author may not be used to endorse or promote 
     products derived from this software without specific prior written 
     permission. 

I'm assuming here that OpenLDAP is not a trademark.  If it is, then I don't need
the following scenario - the problem should be obvious.

Imagine that Linus Torvalds contributed code to OpenLDAP. Now you want 
to say "Our program uses OpenLDAP code and runs on GNU/Linux."  Since Linux is 
a trademark of Linus Torvalds, you can't do that.

Now, if it said "endorse or promote", that would be better, because then you
could reasonanbly talk about the software, so long as you didn't say, "OpenLDAP
thinks FooProduct is great!" (which would be false advertising and would be
disallowed anyway).

As soon as I get a login on the webserver, I will update the license list to 
cover this.

If you know the OpenLDAP authors, and can convince them to change this, that 
would be fabulous.

--
-David "Novalis" Turner,
Licensing Question Volunteer,
Free Software Foundation