On Mon, 12 May 2003 08:14:37 -0600
corbet@lwn.net (Jonathan Corbet) wrote:

> I just took a look - it looks like a free license to me.  The "commercial
> license" referred to gets you out of the requirement to distribute source,
> but I see nothing there that says you *have* to buy a commercial license
> for money-making use.

I looked again (I confess I didn't read the actual license before) and
it still seems closed to me.  In my understanding, the following
states that any software that uses PyMeld needs to be make its source
code available at the cost of distribution plus a nominal fee.  That
doesn't seem to apply to many kinds of money-making use.

#  * Redistributions in any form must be accompanied by information on
#  how to obtain complete source code for the software and any
#  accompanying software that uses the software. The source code must
#  either be included in the distribution or be available for no more
#  than the cost of distribution plus a nominal fee, and must be
#  freely redistributable under reasonable conditions.

I believe that even when one has only open source projects in mind, it
wouldn't be considered a free license.  The FSF would surely object to
the "advertisement clause" that was also there in earlier versions of
the BSD license ("Redistributions of source code must retain the above
copyright notice..." and "Redistributions in binary form must
reproduce the above copyright notice,").  In my understanding, this
makes the license GPL incompatible.

Ugh, licensing...  Necessary but not easy..

--b