The way Cengiz explained USC's copyright to me it was supposed to mean: You can not sell this stuff (the software) without giving us a part of the profit. It was not supposed to mean: if you are a commercial company, you can't use it. After the RA project was about providing infrastructure to support an Internet that had become commercial, right? In any case, no one, other than USC, can remove their copyright from the code but if the real interpretation of the copyright statement happens to be the more restrictive one, then the RIPE NCC would certainly have a problem with this code, because we *HAVE* to make the software we develop available for use by the community. Joao At 05:13 -0700 4/10/01, Bill Manning wrote:
% Like I said, most (techie) people don't give a hoot, but legal % departments at largish outfits can seriously halt Progress(tm). Although % RIPE and the RIPE NCC are non-profit organisations, most of the members % are most definitely out to make a (euro-)buck. It's only proper that if % these tools are to be hosted/provided/maintained by the RIPE NCC, that % the restrictive license is removed. Replacing it with a RIPE/RIPE NCC % copyright may make non-RIPE members nervous, so I still think a GNU-like % license is the safest and fairest option.
I spect that the USC tag still claims that it needs to stay w/ the code so RIPE would need to do a "clean-room" reimplementation to expunge the USC tag.
Of course RIPE could also cut a deal w/ USC on broad commercial use of the tools. That has often proved to be the cheapest/easiest course. % % Cheers, % Steven %
-- --bill
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