Re: PuTTY Bidi - final points

[Muhammad Alkarouri <malkarouri at yahoo dot co dot uk>]

On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 19:42, Nadim Shaikli wrote:
> --- Simon Tatham wrote:
...

> > > I think ICU's licence is probably OK , but you will need to get an OK
> > > from Simon for that (and whether we're happy to embed that in PuTTY).
> > > The licence looks like MIT:
> > > 
> > > http://oss.software.ibm.com/cvs/icu/~checkout~/icu/license.html
> > 
> > That's a very strange licence! The wording is MIT-like, but the
> > `no promotion' clause at the end looks more like BSD.
> > 
> > I'm unconvinced about this, I'm afraid. That promotion clause looks
> > horribly like a GPL incompatibility to me, and one reason I like the
> > MIT licence is that it's fully GPL-compatible.
> 
> We have 3 options here then,
> 
>  1. Contact ICU's authors and FSF for clarification on ICU's
>     license (I doubt ICU/IBM was shooting for anything that is
>     NOT fully GPL-compatible - I also thought ICU is being used
>     in GPL projects, no ?).  This might actually get resolved
>     very fast with recent attention to the license changes on
>     Xfree and Apache and would play well with regard to the
>     SCO/IBM lawsuits, etc.  Simon ?
> 

Short answer, no need. It _is_ GPL-compatible, as stated by the FSF


I am not related to ICU/IBM/FSF/etc, but I would like to draw your
attention to the fact that this is exactly the X11 license explicitly
mentioned by FSF as GPL compatible under the name 'The X11 License'. See
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses .

As for the no promotion clause, it is definitely contained in the X11
License mentioned above. As far as I understand, it has no relation to
the the original BSD license problem, which locks your product in terms
of advertisement, you must mention the original author or authors. The
no promotion statement in the X11 amounts to the fact you cannot imply
that _your_ software is made or endorsed by IBM (for example) without
their consent, which is not legal anyway. Just to make sure that the
license is not interpreted as giving that away.

For reference, the original BSD license problem problem is explained at
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html .


Regards,

Muhammad Alkarouri