T here is a rule in the House of Commons that whenever a document is
referred to the entirety of the document must be lodged in the house
library, rather than just the portions that are quoted.
What was the letter sent to Dr Hazel? What are the grounds on which his
statement is based? What is the context of the excerpt?
It seems somewhat strange that Dr Hazel would take this position when he has
in the past taken a much more open approach to licensing:
Written by: Philip Hazel < <http://lists.gnu.org/spam.html>
address(_at_)bogus(_dot_)example(_dot_)com>
University of Cambridge Computing Service,
Cambridge, England. Phone: <redacted>
Copyright (c) 1997-2000 University of Cambridge
Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose on any
computer system, and to redistribute it freely, subject to the following
restrictions:
1. This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
2. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented, either by
explicit claim or by omission. In practice, this means that if you use
PCRE in software which you distribute to others, commercially or
otherwise, you must put a sentence like this
Regular expression support is provided by the PCRE library package,
which is open source software, written by Philip Hazel, and copyright
by the University of Cambridge, England.
somewhere reasonably visible in your documentation and in any relevant
files or online help data or similar. A reference to the ftp site for
the source, that is, to
<ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/>
ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/
should also be given in the documentation.
3. Altered versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be
misrepresented as being the original software.
4. If PCRE is embedded in any software that is released under the GNU
General Purpose Licence (GPL), then the terms of that licence shall
supersede any condition above with which it is incompatible.
I hate to keep harping on this, but I really do believe that it is
important. I solicited the opinion of Dr. Philip Hazel of Cambridge
University who as you probably know is the principal author of Exim. I
asked him if he would consider releasing Exim under a difference license
other than the GPL if doing so would allow Sender-ID code to be included in
it. His response was:
"The short answer is "No".
I have no desire to change Exim's licence, and certainly not as a result
from pressure of Microsoft's lawyers. Furthermore, some of the other
postings I've seen have said that developers using this "free" licence
must register with Microsoft. That is completely unacceptable."
I believe that Dr. Hazel's response demonstrates two things. The first is
that one of the most popular MTAs in use will not be able to include
Sender-ID code. The second is that a very well respected open source
developer sees the IPR license terms as "completely unacceptable".
Kevin