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

[Bill Lorensen]

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
>>
>