Hi Francesco, I contacted upstream a number of times a couple of years ago, and never got any reply.
That said, a couple of people convinced me that OCTPL is (now)
GPL-compatible, so FreeCAD is distributable, based on the following
points:
* The clause indicating "You are also obliged to send your
modifications of the original source code (if you've made any)
to the Initial Developer", which was in OCTPL 6.2, is gone from
OCTPL 6.3.0. The license on opencascade.org is wrong, see the
LICENSE file in the distribution, where the introductory
language containing the above clause has been removed.
* The statement that the copyright license is not a trademark
license is not in conflict with the GPL, and explicitly stated
as an option in GPL-3. I don't think anyone believes GPL-3 is
incompatible with GPL-2...
* There are other copyleft licenses which are GPL-compatible but
do not include explicit GPL-compatibility clauses. (And there
are probably copyleft licenses which claim to be GPL-compatible
in their clauses but aren't.) The basic requirement is that the
license not add additional restrictions beyond the GPL.
LGPL licensing of OpenCASCADE would clear this up once and for all. But
on the other hand, as one debian-legal poster mentioned (sorry, can't
find the reference just now), the trademark clause clarifies the (lack
of) trademark rights on derivatives more than other licenses (such as
Firefox, which has a separate trademark policy). Whether that makes it
a "good license" worth using is debatable, but it's doubtful upstream
will walk away from it.
That said, I'm going to contact a couple of people and see if there is a
potential for LGPL licensing...
Sorry these points have not been aired in a public forum before. I'm
not subscribed to debian-legal, and only recently became aware of these
posts (thanks Francesco!), so I didn't know that people were raising an
issue of this.
[As a result of not being subscribed, please CC me in replies.]
-Adam
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