[Insight-developers] ITK not redistributable: copyright statement incomplete

[Steve Robbins]

Hello,

Gavin Baker and I have been working for some time to make Debian  
packages of ITK.  The technical issues have been cleared up and the  
remaining hurdle is the copyright statement.

The ITK copyright statement (http://www.itk.org/HTML/Copyright.htm) is  
incomplete.  It leads one to believe that the entire ITK source tree  
is copyrighted by the consortium, which is absolutely untrue.

The "Copyright.txt" file of the CVS sources is better.  This text  
acknowledges contributions from VTK and from VXL:

   The Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK) was initially
   developed under contract to the National Library of Medicine at the
   National Institutes of Health. ITK is partially derived from VTK and VXL,
   hence some code is copyrighted accordingly (see VTKCopyright.txt and
   VXLCopyright.txt).

However, even this is not the whole story.  There are a number of  
other copyright/license statements not mentioned, such as those of  
directories Utilities/kwsys, Utilities/DICOMParser, and Utilities/png.  
  Bits of the core ITK fall under all kinds of other copyrights, too.   
Examples include: itk_hashtable.h, itk_hash_map.h, itk_hash_set.h,  
itkMersenneTwisterRandomVariateGenerator.h, and vcl_bvector.h

Fortunately, these licenses are all compatible with ITK, at least to  
my un-lawyerly eye, so these omissions are easy to fix.

The real problem is that there are a number that are NOT compatible  
with ITK license in that no license to redistribute is granted:

Code/IO/itkPixelData.h:
   Copyright (C) 1987, 1988, 1989 The General Electric Company

Code/IO/itkAnalyzeDbh.h
   Has parts copyright under copyright by the Mayo Foundataion

Code/Common/itkOctreeNode.cxx
   parts  * Copyright (C) 2002 Iowa Mental Health Clinical Research Center

Code/Common/itkOctreeNode.h
   Copyright (C) 1998 Nancy C. Andreasen and Vincent A. Magnotta

itkThresholdMaximumConnectedComponentsImageFilter.h
itkThresholdMaximumConnectedComponentsImageFilter.txx
     Copyright (c) Ken Urish 2005. All rights reserved.

Utilities/vxl/v3p/netlib
   Netlib and IMSL stuff, no license
   Triangle stuff copyright JR Shewchuk, only free for noncommercial  
and must include full modified source.


I stopped looking at this point.  :-(

What is the procedure to fix inconsistent licensing like this?

Thanks,
-Steve