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

[Bill Lorensen]

Luis,

I guess what we are doing is a "good-effort". Patching the 3.16 is a
"better-effort". Before 3.14 would be a "best-effort", but I think
that good or better is "good enough".

This does point out an issue with using 3rd part libraries.

Bill

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 1:47 PM, Luis Ibanez <luis.ibanez at kitware.com> wrote:
> Bill,
>
>                We should...
>
> but then... not only from ITK 3.16...
>
> We would have to remove it from all previous
> ITK releases that are still downloadable...
>
>
>  This is going to be so much fun....   :-/
>
>
> We will have to patch every release back
> to ITK 1.0 and then regenerate the tarballs
> for each one of those releases.
>
>
> The more I think about it the more I want to
> gather wood and burn the netlib.org web site...
>
>
>     Luis
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------
> On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 1:40 PM, Bill Lorensen <bill.lorensen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Should we take it out of 3.16 also?
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 12:32 PM, Luis Ibanez <luis.ibanez at kitware.com> wrote:
>>> The offending code of the "toms" library has now been
>>> removed from the version of VXL that is distributed with
>>> the Insight Toolkit (ITK):
>>>
>>> http://www.cdash.org/CDash/viewUpdate.php?buildid=526708
>>>
>>> The code in question was not used by ITK itself.
>>>
>>> Our Dashboard builds,
>>> after the removal are still green:
>>>
>>> http://www.cdash.org/CDash/index.php?project=Insight#Continuous
>>>
>>> The upcoming release of ITK 3.18 will represent this change.
>>>
>>> We should pursue an effort for creating a "purified" netlib web
>>> site where only code with clear licensing statements is hosted.
>>>
>>> In the meantime, we should certainly ban the use of code taken
>>> from netlib.
>>>
>>>
>>> Please do not hesitate to let us know if you find any other
>>> piece of code whose license is incompatible with ITK's license.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>    Many Thanks
>>>
>>>
>>>          Luis
>>>
>>>
>>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 10:24 AM, Luis Ibanez <luis.ibanez at kitware.com> wrote:
>>>> 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/
>>>> From what I understand, this licence grants the right to execute,
>>>> copy, modify and distribute the code and the binary only for
>>>> non-commercial use. But for commercial use, you have to get the
>>>> authorisation from the authors.
>>>>
>>>> Considering this situation, I would like to know how you solved this
>>>> licence issue concerning insighttoolkit, so that I can benefit from
>>>> your experience.
>>>>
>>>> Kind Regards
>>>>
>>>> Olivier Robert
>>>>
>>>
>>
>