Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:51:40 -0800
From: Mike Cooper <mike.cooper@magnicomp.com>
To: Tom Callaway <tcallawa@redhat.com>
CC: mcooper@magnicomp.com, Jiri Moskovcak <jmoskovc@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: rdist licensing

Tom,

You have indeed reached the Michael A Cooper listed in the code.

I have no problems with rdist being under a BSD license.  That was the intended 
direction before I ran out of time doing development.

	mike

On 02/17/2011 07:01 AM, Tom Callaway wrote:
> Michael,
>
> We're trying to track down the "Michael A. Cooper" who is listed as a
> copyright holder for the "rdist" software program. Hopefully, this is
> you, but if not, please let us know and accept our apologies in advance.
>
> In a regular licensing audit of Fedora (a popular distribution of Linux
> that includes rdist), we discovered this license:
>
> /*
>   * Copyright (c) 1992-1998 Michael A. Cooper.
>   * This software may be freely used and distributed provided it is not
>   * sold for profit or used in part or in whole for commercial gain
>   * without prior written agreement, and the author is credited
>   * appropriately.
>   */
>
> It is a requirement that all software in Fedora be available under a
> Free Software License. Unfortunately, the language in this license which
> prevents it from being "sold for profit or used in part or in whole for
> commercial gain without prior written agreement" is considered a
> commercial use restriction.
>
> Commercial use restrictions make a license non-free.
>
> In addition, this license does not grant any permissions to modify,
> which is a requirement for a Free Software license.
>
> The rest of the rdist code seems to be under a normal "BSD" license
> which is Free.
>
> Would you consider giving permission to use your copyrighted work in
> rdist under the same BSD license as the rest of the codebase?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Tom Callaway, Fedora Legal