[arachne] Arachne license

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

Hi all,

I have to address a serious legal problem with Arachne open source
license. It was already discussed by a few people more or less
involved in working with Arachne source code, but we all think that
it should be presented to the whole Arachne community.

Arachne is claimed to be under GNU GPL. Those of you who don't know
what it means should read the text of license (warning: complicated
legal language, not easy for non-native English speakers like me).
In case if the source and binary distributions of Arachne do not
contain the text of the license (they didn't at the time when I
downloaded them), it can be found at Free Software Foundation
website (http://www.fsf.org/).

Arachne includes two external libraries. One of them is Erick
Engelke's WATTCP, used for TCP/IP networking. Its sources are
available at http://www.wattcp.com/ and it can be used freely
in free and commercial software, distributed in either source or
binary form. This seems to be compatible with GNU GPL.

The other is the graphics library (HIXLOV.LIB, X_LOPIF.H).
We do not have sources for it and don't know its status (do we?).
This means that the GPL'd code is linked with code which is not
GPL-compatible. This is an obvious violation of GNU GPL. Hence,
Arachne cannot be legally distributed under GPL! (At least until
we have X_LOPIF sources under GPL or another compatible license.)

Bad news, I know, but I am just a messenger...

Michal


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