[ODE] Tri-Collider and License

[Adam D. Moss]

Jeff Weber wrote:
> If I use the Tri-Collider, which uses Opcode, do I have any additional 
> restrictions beyond the ODE licenses?  I couldn't see any mention of a 
> license for opcode. Can it be used in a commercial app?

There is an additional restriction, IIRC it's simply that you
can't remove OPCODE from the ODE tree, call that a product,
and sell it.  The same applies to the ill-defined part of
the ODE core that Erwin submitted that was derived from
Magic's sourcecode, I believe...

However, since these restrictions aren't documented in
ODE's license file (or AFAICT anywhere in the ODE tree at
all), any user could quite readily assume that the whole
of the ODE distribution is under ODE's license (which
IMHO makes sense).  So these additional restrictions are
pretty unenforceable when even basic effort hasn't been
taken to let the users know them.

Again, I very much doubt that anyone is actually going to
take, for example, OPCODE out of the ODE tree and sell it.

But that's not the point; the point is that if you want to
put an additional restriction on a piece of code you release
(or you're integrating someone else's code with a sourcebase
licensed in a way that doesn't satisfy all of their license
requirements!) but then only mention it several postings deep
into a thread on the dev mailing list instead of clearly
making it known alongside your code, then you can't expect
users to comply (and I expect that, say, a court would agree).

Conversely, when you accept a piece of a code into a project
you'd better be sure that its license restrictions are a
strict subset of your own, or that they are well-defined
and you don't mind subsuming them, or that the piece of
code in question is strictly optional, but in all cases
that the license is well-defined.

It's very frustrating to see coders act so fast-and-loose
with licensing issues.  This sort of thing potentially
jeopardises not only themselves but their projects and all
of the users of their code down the line, sometimes even
the end-users (f.e. GIF-writing code and corporate end-users
who believe SCO's latest high-jinks).  And good code can
spread very wide in its lifetime.

IANAL,
--Adam
-- 
Adam D. Moss   . ,,^^   adam@gimp.org   http://www.foxbox.org/   co:3
"I am NOT a nut!  I am the keeper of the seven universal truths!"