[haiku-development] Re: GLUT licence problem

  • From: Alexander von Gluck <kallisti5@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2012 20:05:37 -0500

On 11.08.2012 06:31, François Revol wrote:
On 11/08/2012 11:10, pulkomandy wrote:
This works. However, there are two problems :
 * The Glut library is not maintained anymore. This means we have to
keep our own fork and develop it ourselves.
 * More importantly, we are not allowed to make any changes to Glut. The
licence allows distributing the lib, but not modifying it. This is not
compatible with the MIT licence that Haiku should be using.

The solution seems to be switching to FreeGLUT. This is a rewrite of
GLUT licenced under the MIT Licence, so it should be fine for us to use
it. However, it needs to be ported to Haiku. We also have to watch out
for possible changes in ABI.

This is a rather important licencing issue, as some changes were already
made to our GLUT version:
http://cgit.haiku-os.org/haiku/log/src/libs/mesa/glut
This violates the GLUT licence. So we should find a solution as soon as
possible.


I'd say it could be argued changing it so it works for us falls into
some kind of fair use, and that forbidding to modify sources even for
this is an abusive clause, but I don't think we want to try this in court.

Anyway, it's better to use a Free Software version if we can.

Hmm.. That commit is me moving it from mesa/glut to glut.

Here are the only Glut modifications:
http://cgit.haiku-os.org/haiku/commit/src/libs/glut?id=7b2c1ed631dcdda3d9a6f8c9dce42539eefbd965

Everything else is a 1:1 code move.

As François said however, it is better to use a more open version if we can.

I wasn't aware of those strange license restrictions... weird stuff.

 -- Alex

Other related posts: