[Debian-med-packaging] Licensing question about Insight Toolkit ( VXL / toms / ACM and non-commercial license conflict with BSD license).

[Luis Ibanez]

Hi Oliver,


         Thanks a lot for pointing this out.


As maintainers of the Insight Toolkit, we were not
aware of the licensing status of the "toms" library.

We appreciate very much that you have brought
this to our attention.


The "toms" library is carried by the VXL library, that
in turns, is used by ITK for supporting numerics
operations (i.e. linear algebra, solvers, optimizers...).


As you correctly pointed out, a non-commercial
license is incompatible with the BSD license used
by ITK.  Therefore we will be removing the toms
library from the copy of VXL carried by ITK.

We will do this in the following hours / days.

Certainly, it will be removed
before we cut the release of ITK 3.18.


Please let us know if you are aware of any other
piece of code that has licensing conflicts. We will
be glad to address those conflicts immediately.

-----

<rant>

It is not the first time that we have issues with
code that was taken from www.netlib.org.

This web site may have serve a purpose at some
time, but it doesn't fit anymore the practices of
modern open source communities.

The site lead users to think that it is a repository
of Free and Open Source code, while in practice
it is a disparate collection of software, with few or
no information about copyright and licensing.

I think that the large open Source community should
*ban* this site due to its outdated practices and
ambiguous (and finally deceptive) presentation.

</rant>



     Regards,


          Luis



--------------------------------------------------------------
Hello,

I'm contacting the Debian-Med Packaging Team because I would to ask a
question about the licence of a routine used in the insighttoolkit.
I'm not a user of insighttookit and have no personal interest in that
package, but I'm actually trying to package another software named
eispice (http://www.thedigitalmachine.net/eispice.html) which uses the
same particular routine.
So I hope you can help me on that subject.

Insighttoolkit incorporates third party libraries taken from the "ACM
Collected Algorithms"
http://www.netlib.org/toms/
My question is about one file in particular:
insighttoolkit-3.16.0/Utilities/vxl/v3p/netlib/toms/rpoly.f
The copyright notice as shown on http://www.netlib.org/toms/ indicates:
"Use of ACM Algorithms is subject to the ACM Software Copyright and
License Agreement"
which is futher explained on:
http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/softwarecrnotice/