[okl4-developer] License query

[David Given]

Rob McCammon wrote:
> Thanks for the thorough email explanation of your question. I appreciate the
> concern that would exist if the license were such that one party (A) could
> be in violation of the license as a result of the independent action of
> another party (B). Fortunately that is not the case.

That's good to hear, but unfortunately I'm still not clear on the
reasoning...

[...]
> The key to understanding the answer to your question may center on the use
> of the phrase "accompanying software" in 1.c.ii. The terms of the open
> source license apply to software that is redistributed with OKL4.

However, does not "all accompanying software that uses the Software ...
indirectly ... must ... be included in the distribution ... and ... be
licensed ... under ... the terms of a license which is approved by the
Open Source Initiative" obligate me to include the entire software stack
in the redistribution?

I should explain the exact situation:

The project I'm working on is a virtualisiation environment and kernel
reimplementation of Acorn's RISC OS (you know, the *original* ARM OS).
This will allow people to run a RISC OS software stack sitting on top of
my kernel emulation, which in turn uses OKL4 for the heavy lifting.

Most RISC OS software is freely available under its own dual-licensing
scheme. Like OK's license, this license dictates that all
redistributions and derived works must use their license. Naturally,
it's incompatible with the OK license.

What would normally happen in this situation is that I'd just provide
two separate packages and require the end user to download them both.
One contains the OKL4 stuff; the other contains the RISC OS stuff. This
would then be deployed separately onto the target device (and, in fact,
the RISC OS APIs encourage this; the kernel APIs are well defined and
public).

However, my reading of the OK license would imply that *because* the
RISC OS stuff can be used on top of my kernel on top of the
OKL4-licensed kernel, then it counts as 'accompanying software', and
therefore *must* include it in the distribution. And since the OK
license requires that all non-OK code in the distribution *must* be OSI
licensed, that means I can't distribute at all.

The issue here is the combination of 'accompanying software' (which as
you say, you *mean* only what's in the redistribution package) and
'indirect' (which seems to mean that I have to include *everything* in
the redistribution package).

(I should also point out that I'm not at all interested in commercial
development; this is small-f-free software. In the unlikely event of
anyone ever wanting to produce a commercial product with this stuff on
it, I'm quite happy with requiring them to go to both the RISC OS people
*and* you for commercial licenses.)

-- 
David Given
dg at cowlark.com