Fwd: Open Watcom license issues

[Pedro F. Giffuni]

Hi;

This was posted today (on a slightly different form) on the Openwatcom
newsgroups. I thought some people might like to know. 

Also... NO, they are not considering the BSDL and please keep me off any
licensing bikeshed that might start here :).

__________________
Hi All,

I have good news on the Open Watcom license issues. We had a conference 
call with Sybase this afternoon to discuss the license issues, and 
Sybase is considering taking the suggestion of Bart Oldeman and 
incorporating the changes that Apple made in their APL 2.0 license for 
the Open Watcom Public License 2.0.

We are also looking specifically at this issues of runtime library 
redistribution, and more importantly proprietry programs linked against 
the runtime library. If necessary Sybase will consider allowing the 
runtime library binaries, and binary code linked with the runtime 
library, to be licensed under a different license. The license would be 
more like the runtime library license you find with any regular 
commercial compiler such as Visual C++ or Borland C++.

To that end however we are also considering whether a few modifications 
to the Open Watcom license 2.0 would alleviate the need for for a 
separate runtime library license. If there are specific areas of the the 
proposed 2.0 license you feel conflict with the needs of commercial 
developers, please let me know so we can discuss this with Sybase. More 
importantly if you have suggestions for how to make the license better, 
let me know also.

For reference, here is a PDF copy of the proposed Sybase V2.0 license, 
along with a redline marked version so you can see the changes from the 
V1.0 license:

http://www.openwatcom.org/ftp/license-2.pdf

http://www.openwatcom.org/ftp/license-2-redline.pdf

-- 

Thanks!

-- 
Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com

~ SciTech SNAP - The future of device driver technology!




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