Re: An advise how to apply for the TkMan author to change his license.

[Shaul Karl <shaulk@israsrv.net.il>]

> 
> Hi there,
> 
> David wrote:
>  > The way I read it, the rights are probably held by UC Berkeley. The license
>  > probably was put on it by the college, and the author doesn't any power over
>  > it except going to bug the lawyers and seeing if he can get a better license.
>  > If you still want to approach him, you may want to assume that he knows
>  > about free software and explain why it would be nice for it to be DFSG-free, 
>  > instead of trying to evangalize the GPL.
> 
> You're quite right.  I was the last maintainer of this package.  I had
> asked the author about these licence issues, and he told me he could
> not change it because of his university's lawyers or something like
> that.
> 
> Maybe someone wants to ask him again ?


I already did and it was changed in the newest version.


[22:42:00 src]$ tail -n 9 tkman-2.1b4/README-tkman 

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
documentation for documentation for any purpose, without fee, and
without a written agreement is hereby granted.  This software is
provided on as "as is" basis, without any warranty whatsoever.

(This version of TkMan represents a complete rewrite of version 1.4 of
1993, which is copyrighted by the Regents of the University of
California, and therefore is not under their jurisdiction.)
[22:42:05 src]$ 


I still have problems with DFSG because:
1) The current license mentions "for documentation for any purpose". Can I 
overlook it on the basis that the whole purpose of TkMan is for presenting 
documentation so that any use for it that does not meant "for documentation" 
is, actually composing a new software from the start?
2) rman, which TkMan depends on is still not free as we need it to be. Since 
the same author of the TkMan package is the author of the rman package I tend 
to conclude that this is merely a matter of confusion.
Does the maintainer of the rman package, namely Stephen M. Moraco 
<stephen@col.hp.com> think that it is a good idea to approach the author to 
have it released under a free license as well? It seems to me that Tom Phelps 
<phelps@CS.Berkeley.EDU> (the author)  is in favor of it.
3) Should I, or perhaps someone with more authority and experience advise the 
author to mentions specifically that he still keeps the copyright of the 
software to himself? Are there any other points in the above license that can 
be exploited in a way that the author will surely not agrees to?



-- 
Shaul Karl		 		   shaulk@israsrv.net.il
	An elephant is a mouse with an operating system.