man pages for GLUT?

[Mike A. Harris]

Jonathan Berry wrote:

>>>I've noticed that there is some HTML documentation included with the
>>
>> > Fedora rpm, but nothing quite as helpful as man pages.  If there
>> > are not any licencing issues with the man pages (could there be?),
>> > would it be possible for the Fedora rpms to include these?
>> > I have no idea where they come from.
>>
>>If there are GLUT manpages which are licensed under a proper OSI
>>approved OSS license, once the author of them submits them to the
>>freeglut project, they will probably appear in a future release of
>>freeglut.
>>
>>Study the SuSE src.rpm and determine where the manpages they allegedly
>>ship actually come from, and try to find a license for them.
>>
>>Another option is for someone to volunteer to write manpages for
>>freeglut from scratch and submit them to the freeglut project.
> 
> Well, after some digging, this is what I have found out.  The
> freeglut-2.4.0-4.src.rpm from (Open) SuSE 10 (can be found here:
> ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.0-OSS/inst-source/suse/src/
> ) contains a glutman.tar.bz2 with the GLUT man pages.  I could find
> nothing that indicated where the man pages came from.  Some google
> work turned up a site from SGI which had "freeware" packages on it,
> including a GLUT package.  It appears the man pages have been
> extracted from the glut-3.7.tar.gz source tarball from this site:
> http://freeware.sgi.com/source/  I have not been able to find anything
> that looks definitive on a license.  The best I could find is the
> NOTICE file in the glut-3.7.tar.gz tarball:
>
> NOTICE:  The OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT) distribution contains source
> code published in a book titled "Programming OpenGL for the X Window
> System" (ISBN: 0-201-48359-9) published by Addison-Wesley.  The
> programs and associated files contained in the distribution were
> developed by Mark J. Kilgard and are Copyright 1994, 1995, 1996 by Mark
> J. Kilgard (unless otherwise noted).  The programs are not in the
> public domain, but they are freely distributable without licensing
> fees.  These programs are provided without guarantee or warrantee
> expressed or implied.

The original GLUT library is written by Mark J. Kilgard, who is still
currently the copyright owner.  The license of the GLUT source code does
not permit modification and redistribution of the modified sources, and
as such it is not OSI approved open source software.

Several years ago, we became aware of this licensing issue and contacted
Mark via email to try to find an amiable solution for the licensing
problem.  Unfortunately, Mark is quite adamant about current license
which GLUT is released under, and is not willing to relicense it under
a proper OSI approved license.  Perhaps what is worse than that however,
is that he doesn't want to be bothered by anyone about any kind of
legal issues.  He considers GLUT a "done" thing, and if people want to
use it as-is, that's fine with him.  If people don't like the license,
that's their problem essentially.

This created a problem for us, because the GLUT sources contain various
bugs, as well as a few security vulnerabilities.  Since the license does
not permit us to modify the code and distribute the resulting code and
binaries, we would be unable to support it properly, and the decision
was made to remove it from the distribution.

I did a bit of research and discovered the freeglut project, which at
the time was still quite experimental.  We included one of the
experimental versions of freeglut in one OS release, with the plan of
updating it once the official stable release of freeglut came out.

Since then, we have shipped freeglut in each OS release, and haven't
seen many problems reported, so it seems to have been a good decision
overall.  Another project out there, which is a friendly-fork of
freeglut called "openglut" exists as well.  The two projects contribute
code back and forth, and IIRC use similar licenses.  So there are at
least 3 GLUT implementations in existence, and 2 of them are open
source.

One of the preconditions that must be met in order for something to be
included in Fedora Core (or Extras), is that it has to be licensed
under an OSI approved open source license, and GLUT does not meet this
requirement.  That includes the official GLUT manpages.

 > Apparently, OpenSuSE feels they can include these man pages with their
 > freeglut package.  Anyone have any thoughts on this?

SuSE has different criterion for inclusion of software into their OS
than Red Hat does.  They've even shipped proprietary video drivers in
their OS before.

Theoretically, we could ship proprietary software, or non-OSS software
with Fedora Core too, if the Fedora Project considered it acceptable
to do so.  We do not consider it acceptable to do so however.

Another side that must be considered to any potential software
inclusion in any OS, are legal issues.  Fedora has legal policies
which must be adhered to, and all legal matters that arise, including
issues with regard to copyrights, patents, trademarks, and other
intellectual property, must be submitted through legal counsel who
has the final say.  If legal counsel decides that we should not ship
something - for whatever reason, then we simply do not ship it.

Other distributions may or may not take legal matters as seriously as
Red Hat and the Fedora Foundation do.  Of course, that is their own
choice to decide, and their own legal risks to make.  Every distribution
has to seek their own legal advice and make their own decisions based
on that advice.

Having said that, SuSE has always traditionally been a mixture of
open source and non-OSS software.  I'm not aware of what their current
philosophy is, but ours is to not ship non-OSS software, including
documentation.  The GLUT license does not prohibit SuSE nor Red Hat
from shipping the source/binaries/manpages.  It prohibits modification
and redistribution of the modified results.  That may be acceptable
to SuSE, but it is unacceptable to Red Hat.

If people care strongly about having freeglut manpages, join the
freeglut (or openglut) projects, and volunteer to write manpages
from scratch so that they are included in a future release of
freeglut.  Do not use the official GLUT manpages as a source
however.

Hope this clarifies things.






-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.