Re: Povray, fedora extras and licensing

[Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 freenet de>]

On Fri, 2006-02-03 at 11:06 -0500, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> It reminds me of some of Mozilla's Firefox/Iceweasel stuff.
> 
> Lemme get this in front of the board.

The crucial points of this license are

[..]
3.4. Except as explicitly set out in this agreement, nothing in this 
     agreement permits Distributor to make any modification to any part 
     of the Software.
[..]

and 4. as a whole, with an emphasize on 

4.1. Nothing in this agreement gives the Distributor:
[..]
      (b) any rights or permissions in respect of, including rights or 
          permissions to distribute or permit the use of, any Derived 
          Code;

There exist packages which once were based on povray code and ended up
in trench wars on interpreting the povray license and abandoning
supporting povray.


As I read all this, the license grants rights to "distribute binaries
and the sources of poyray", but does not allow using their sources.
I don't see how this way of shipping is substantially different from
"Closed Source". Similar to to the nvidia stuff it's conditionally
distributable, but its sources actually are non-free.

I'd be glad to be proved wrong ;)

BTW: Debian has povray-3.5 in "stable", but classifies it as "non-free".

Ralf