Hi Mike, et al,
I am not the original author of dxpc, that being Brian Pane. However, I took
over maintenance circa 1999 and am still the primary maintainer (though the
project has effectively been dead for most of a decade now).
As you are aware, when I inherited the code, it was licensed under a variant
of the BSD license that did not include the 'with modification' clause. To the
best of my recollection, somebody from the FSF contacted me circa 2001
regarding this and as a result, subsequent releases were done under a standard
2-clause BSD license with the modification clause. Again, to the best of my
recollection, I contacted Brian about this change and he offered no objection.
Further, I recall distinctly that NoMachine contacted me and explicitly
asked permission before including DXPC code in NX, which I happily granted with
no new conditions beyond the BSD license already in play.
It is possible, though by no means certain, that I could dig up ancient
email to corroborate this account if necessary. However, I am more than willing
to publicly state that I believe NoMachine's use of DXPC code to be both legal
and ethical, and that my intent when changing the license to 2-clause BSD was
simply to clarity the existing intent and that it ought therefore be considered
retroactive.
Yours,
Kevin Vigor
On 05/11/15 22:46, Mike Gabriel wrote:
Dear Kevin,
(I Cc: several people involved in this, also the X2Go development mailing
list...)
[If you feel unconfortable with discussing the details / the impact of the
below in public, feel free to answer to me directly first with questions and
concerns, before answering to all people who are listed in Cc:.]
Someone from the Debian legal team recently brought up a license issue
discovered in nx-libs 3.x series.
TL;DR; Suggested by Francesco Poli from the Debian legal team: """
(A) someone gets in touch with DXPC copyright owners and asks them
whether the re-licensing [in 2002] may be considered retroactive (applicable to
older versions of DXPC); in case the answer is negative, DXPC copyright
owners should be persuaded to make the re-licensing retroactive
"""
The person contacting you about the above question is me. Mike Gabriel, Debian Developer
and one of the current upstream maintainers of nx-libs 3.x (previously also know as
"NX redistributed" for X2Go) [1].
This issue requires some time of reading from you and (hopefully) a public
statement, that the original DXPC code can be considered as BSD-2-clause (the
current license) also for released versions prior 2002 when the ancient BSD
license template [2] was still shipped with DXPC.
For a complete follow-up, please check Debian bug #784565 [3].
We are aware that NoMachine forked DXPC at some early stage around the year
2000 and wrote their own commercial product around it. Obviously, this fork
happened before 2002 (i.e., before DXPC release 3.8.1), as libxcomp3 in
NoMachine's NX ships the previously used BSD license template. I am not sure,
if that fork was easy for you or actually a nuisance. I may only guess at this
point. I'd be happy to know more (maybe not in this mail thread, though).
NoMachine has stopped publishing NXv3 updates a couple of years ago (2011 IIRC), now. The maintenance has
been moved into the hands of the currently available FLOSS projects "X2Go", "Arctica
Project" [NEW] and "TheQVD". Some of us are running a business model on top of that
(consultancy, support contracts, feature development contracts), some of us spend a lot of their free time on
improving / maintaining nx-libs (as we call NoMachine's NXv3 at the moment).
To outline the impact of my mail clearly: If you say that it was not legal by
NoMachine to fork DXPC at the given time (before 2002), then all FLOSS remote
desktop / remote application would be in real trouble, because then the core
component of their software projects could not be considered as free (as in
DFSG, Debian free software guidelines[4]) anymore. Also the code changes
originally performed by NoMachine might have been illegal in the first place.
All current maintenance activities and also planned future development on
nx-libs would become questionable.
Thus, I hope you can chime in on this: Dear developers of nx-libs, please
assume the BSD-2-license as retroactive and applicable to DXPC version earlier
than 3.8.1. As the copyright holder, I agree with modifications of code bases
that originate before the change to BSD-2-clause license got introduced in
3.8.1 of DXPC.
And... I will bring up that question later (but it is burning under my
nails)... Be sure: The nx-libs maintainers would be happy to have the original
DXPC author on the nx-libs developer team. But I will bring up that question
later (when this very issue is settled). ;-)
Greets,
Mike
[1] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#Previous_license
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/784565
[4] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines
On Mo 11 Mai 2015 21:36:59 CEST, Francesco Poli wrote:
On Mon, 11 May 2015 09:26:36 +0000 Mike Gabriel wrote:
[...]
As it seems, dxpc has been long ago relicensed to BSD-2-clause (for
v3.8.1 in/around 2002).
This is great news, indeed!
I have no exact clue, if NoMachine forked prior to that (if they quote
the old licensing terms, then probably they did).
Yep, it's plausible...
However, how do you see the situation considering that upstream
changed to BSD-2-clause a long time ago. What approach do you propose
for nx-libs-lite to get the issue fully fixed?
If the fork has been performed before the DXPC re-licensing (as it's
likely), I see two possible strategies:
(A) someone gets in touch with DXPC copyright owners and asks them
whether the re-licensing may be considered retroactive (applicable to
older versions of DXPC); in case the answer is negative, DXPC copyright
owners should be persuaded to make the re-licensing retroactive
(B) nx-libs-lite upstream developers re-fork from scratch, basing the
new code on a BSD-licensed version of DXPC (I suspect this may turn out
to be somewhat painful...)
Obviously, the optimal solution is (A). I hope it may work...
Thanks for your time and for your prompt and kind replies.
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