[Insight-developers] ITKv4 : LICENSE Changed to Apache 2.0

[Bradley Lowekamp]

Simple questions below..

On Oct 8, 2010, at 9:55 AM, Luis Ibanez wrote:

> Hi Tom,
> 
> Please see comments below.
> 
>  
>       Thanks
> 
> 
>            Luis
> 
> 
> --------------------------------------
> On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 2:40 PM, Tom Vercauteren <tom.vercauteren at m4x.org> wrote:
> Hi Luis,
> 
> Excuse my ignorance about licenses but I have a few questions
> regarding this change.
> 
> 
> 
> Discussing the terms of the license is very important,
> so,  Thank You  for asking.  
> 
> We must do our best to ensure that every user and 
> developer understand the terms of the license.
> 
> 
>  
> 1) Does the redistribution clause 4.2 requires that if someone
> distributes some binary software that uses a patched ITK, this someone
> has to mention the names of all patched files? This is what I
> understand from
> http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html#redistribution
> but the FAQ seems to say otherwise
> http://www.apache.org/foundation/licence-FAQ.html#WhatDoesItMEAN
> I hope the FAQ has it right because it seems a bit cumbersome to list
> all modified files in a place accessible to the end user. Not that I
> keep ITK patches privately but I often have some ITK patches in my
> software before they make it to ITK proper.
> 
> 
> 
> The "intent" of the clause is to prevent a developer from modifying the
> software and redistribute the modification creating the impression that 
> it is the original software.  The goal is to prevent confusion among users
> and to protect the reputation of the software.
> 
> This only applies if you decide to redistribute the source code of the
> modified files, in which case, it is good sense to visibly indicate that 
> this is: "Tom's improved version of ITK", and not the original release 
> of "ITK 3.20" (for example).
> 
> A similar clause used to exist in the initial BSD-modified version of 
> license that ITK 1.0 had. That was indeed the clause that made that
> license to be not-BSD. We subsequently changed to the OSI-approved
> BSD license, in order to adhere to the good practices of open source.
> 
> It you are distributing a binary version of an application that was built
> with a "modified ITK", then the clause does not apply to you, since you
> are not required to distribute the source code of the modified ITK.
>  

GitHub came to mind as I was reading this. GitHub has the new idea of social coding, so that many people have their own repository and are redistributing their branches or modified software. This seems to make this point a lot fuzzier to me. I suppose the revision history is enough to indicate the divergence from the official repository.

Brad



========================================================
Bradley Lowekamp  
Lockheed Martin Contractor for
Office of High Performance Computing and Communications
National Library of Medicine 
blowekamp at mail.nih.gov


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.itk.org/mailman/private/insight-developers/attachments/20101008/741b805a/attachment.htm>