[hypermail] license in archive/

From: Bernhard Reiter <bernhard_at_intevation.de_at_hypermail-project.org>
Date: Sat, 3 Aug 2002 21:01:51 +0200
Message-ID: <20020803190151.GA1067_at_intevation.de>

Stumbled about a license flaw in hypermail, which hopefully is only an outdated statement.

README (Revision 1.5) says:

        License Evolution:

        So now Hypermail is under GNU.

This should probably read "GNU GPL" or even better:

    	This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
	modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
	published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the
	License, or (at your option) any later version.

as in COPYING (Revision 1.1.1.1) you can find the GNU GPL Version 2.

However in the three source files in archive/ you will find

• This software is Copyright (c) 1996 by Kent Landfield. **
• Permission is hereby granted to copy, distribute or otherwise
• use any part of this package as long as you do not try to make
• money from it or pretend that you wrote it. This copyright
• notice must be maintained in any copy made.

This license statement forbits commercial use and thus is a proprietory software license incompatible with the GNU GPL. It does not seems to be a derivate work of hypermail, thus the license seems to be possible. However it not being Free Software there are three options:

• Ask Kent Landfield to change the license
• Remove it from the hypermail tarball
• Reimplement it as Free Software.

Note that the functionality is not completely superceded by the new hypermail functions. And then some people are running old version of hypermail which want to keep the structure.

        Bernhard

Received on Mon 05 Aug 2002 04:40:14 PM GMT