[72] in SIPB_Linux_Development
Re: Motif Licensing questions.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts'o)
Wed Jul 7 00:50:22 1993
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 93 00:49:56 EDT
From: tytso@athena.mit.edu (Theodore Ts'o)
To: yandros@athena.mit.edu
Cc: linux-dev@athena.mit.edu
Cc: vanharen@athena.mit.edu, alexp@athena.mit.edu
In-Reply-To: "[56] in SIPB_Linux_Development"
[0056] daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (yandros@athena.mit.edu) SIPB_Linux_Development 07/05/93 02:29 (65 lines)
From: yandros@athena.mit.edu
Date: Sat, 3 Jul 93 03:03:30 -0400
This is the combination of a short dialog with Chris Vanharen and Alex
Prengle <alex@mit.edu>, who's taken over Chris' responsibilities
w.r.t. Motif licensing.
The first round of questions:
The basic idea is that only form of Motif we can distribute is what they
call a "Run Time Copy", which is a completely embedded form of Motif that
will only operate within a specific binary and is inseparable from
it (i.e. a static Motif binary).
The more I think about this, the more this doesn't seem right. It
certainly seems to be at odds with the current status of the motif
locker (/mit/motif). The SOURCE_POLICY file states that anyone at MIT
can be added to the list of people getting access to the sources. So
it's not like the sources themselves are restricted, as long as you're a
member of the MIT community.
Furthermore, the Motif libraries themselves are world-readable, at least
in /mit/motif/{decmips,vax,rt,sun4}lib. This would tend to make me
believe that as long as we distributed the libraries to MIT students
only, this would be OK. The README.license seems to indicate that we
have the right to distribute statically linked object code which is
inseparable to *anyone*. But that's not important. What is important
is whether we can distribute shared libraries *only* to the MIT
community.
Because, if we can't, then logically the MIT community shouldn't be
given access to the Motif libraries in /mit/motif, and then we wouldn't
be able to write any Motif programs at all!
Chirs, Alex, could you please comment? Thanks....
- Ted
