[PD] PiDiP's legal status

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, juto aviten wrote:

> the personn concern by this didn't really give his opinion, or maybe I
> am wrong he already done in a previous thread that talked about this
> problem.

I am only giving a summary of what happened on another mailing-list. By 
consulting the archives of pd-dev and pd-ot you can very well figure out 
what the personne concernée thinks of all this.

> we all agree that all versions realized since now are under GPL's
> licence terms and that won't change!

Source files in PiDiP say the software is under the GPL but LICENSE.txt
says it's SIBSD plus the military clause ("not for military use..."). 
pdp_colorgrid.c refers to LICENSE.txt as being its license. Other files 
say they are under the GPL and don't even mention LICENSE.txt. Are you 
confused yet? At the very least you can't link pdp_colorgrid with anything 
in PiDiP. For the other files, LICENSE.txt says that specific files may be 
excepted explicitly from the license, but the way it's worded, the 
military clause doesn't seem to be exceptable from. And then it's sort of 
fishy if 99% of the source files get an exception from LICENSE.txt, don't 
you think?

What would a lawyer make of this? (that is, apart from money)

> Is this double licence will affect the copy of the software, to change
> the code, redistribute it...

You can't copy PiDiP nor make modified copies of it because both licenses
say that you have to preserve the existing license and the GPL license
says that you can't add more restrictions, but the military clause is an
added restriction.

> why did you talked, Mathieu, in the term "non-free software, and at
> worst, it's illegal to distribute it"?

Well, SIBSD is a very popular free software license, but the line added 
specifically for PiDiP makes it non-free, and then ambiguating that with 
the GPL makes more meat for the lawyers. Not like there would be much 
money to be made, but many organisations have a policy to stay away from 
any kind of license mess.

> We need to know if this is serious or non-sense? Why Yves choose 2
> licence, why GPL is not anymore suited to his work?

I can't read Yves' mind. I can only read what he wrote in his source code 
and on mailing lists. BTW, please read this:

  http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-ot/2006-01/001377.html

And then tell me, how would you deal with someone that has that kind of
attitude?

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada