As of 2001, CP/M, originally from Digital Research, was released under a license that has been reported as open source:
http://www.cpm.z80.de/license.html
On the one hand, I'm concerned with the phrase "as part of the 'Unofficial CP/M Web Site", but on the other hand, that is immediately followed by "with its maintainers, developers and community", which seems broadly inclusive.
Is this license satisfactory for Fedora?
Best regards, Eric
On 02/27/2018 03:03 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
As of 2001, CP/M, originally from Digital Research, was released under a license that has been reported as open source:
http://www.cpm.z80.de/license.html
On the one hand, I'm concerned with the phrase "as part of the 'Unofficial CP/M Web Site", but on the other hand, that is immediately followed by "with its maintainers, developers and community", which seems broadly inclusive.
Is this license satisfactory for Fedora?
My reading is that this is a permissive open source license. I would argue that Fedora, in the act of distributing the CP/M technology found on the 'Unofficial CP/M Web Site', is part of the community (as well as anyone downstream of Fedora).
That said, the wording is weird, so I'm deferring to Richard.
~tom
On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 03:13:08PM -0500, Tom Callaway wrote:
On 02/27/2018 03:03 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
As of 2001, CP/M, originally from Digital Research, was released under a license that has been reported as open source:
http://www.cpm.z80.de/license.html
On the one hand, I'm concerned with the phrase "as part of the 'Unofficial CP/M Web Site", but on the other hand, that is immediately followed by "with its maintainers, developers and community", which seems broadly inclusive.
Is this license satisfactory for Fedora?
My reading is that this is a permissive open source license. I would argue that Fedora, in the act of distributing the CP/M technology found on the 'Unofficial CP/M Web Site', is part of the community (as well as anyone downstream of Fedora).
That said, the wording is weird, so I'm deferring to Richard.
That is possibly the worst-written license I have seen in quite some time, but I actually think it is acceptable for Fedora for the reasons Tom and Eric gave.
I am a little more concerned by the appearance of substantial sketchiness of the ownership situation, but a few minutes' research suggests bare minimum plausibility.
Richard
On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 1:41 PM, Richard Fontana rfontana@redhat.com wrote:
That is possibly the worst-written license I have seen in quite some time, but I actually think it is acceptable for Fedora for the reasons Tom and Eric gave.
Thanks Richard and Tom! What should I use for the License tag in the RPM?
I've sent email to Bryan Sparks asking whether he is still in a position of authority to deal with CP/M licensing, and if so, whether he might grant a license under a common open source license; I suggested possibly BSD 2-clause. However, I have no idea whether the email address I found for him will actually work.
In the mean time, I'm intending to package "z80pack" for Fedora. That includes emulation of various 8080 and Z80 systems. There are various disk images included. I'll put the CP/M images in a subpackage. I think there may be licensing issues with some of the other disk images, so I may have to produce a cleaned source tarball that omits those.
Best regards, Eric
On 02/27/2018 04:23 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 1:41 PM, Richard Fontana <rfontana@redhat.com mailto:rfontana@redhat.com> wrote:
That is possibly the worst-written license I have seen in quite some time, but I actually think it is acceptable for Fedora for the reasons Tom and Eric gave.Thanks Richard and Tom! What should I use for the License tag in the RPM?
Use:
License: CPM
I've sent email to Bryan Sparks asking whether he is still in a position of authority to deal with CP/M licensing, and if so, whether he might grant a license under a common open source license; I suggested possibly BSD 2-clause. However, I have no idea whether the email address I found for him will actually work.
Oh man, that will be a fun one. It seems that Lineo was the last known owner of the CP/M copyright (Digital Research -> Novell -> Caldera -> Lineo), but Lineo was carved up and its assets went all over the place. I _think_ the most likely place is with DrDOS Inc. (formerly DeviceLogics), where Bryan Sparks is the current CEO (afaik). http://drdos.com/company/namagement/
In the mean time, I'm intending to package "z80pack" for Fedora. That includes emulation of various 8080 and Z80 systems. There are various disk images included. I'll put the CP/M images in a subpackage. I think there may be licensing issues with some of the other disk images, so I may have to produce a cleaned source tarball that omits those.
Yeah, be careful, but that sounds right.
~tom
-
Eric Smith -
Richard Fontana -
Tom Callaway