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

[Luis Ibanez]

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
>>>
>>
>