[Openicc] GoSoC 2011: opensource and ICC licenses

[Kai-Uwe Behrmann]

Am 05.05.11, 13:24 -0400 schrieb James Cloos:
>>>>>> "er" == edmund ronald <edmundronald at gmail.com> writes:
>
> er> I think there is some part of the conversation which I have missed
> er> here.  Anyone want to forward it, or educate me?  I am not a lawyer
>
> Clauses along the lines of "you can't change it w/o also renaming it"
> were determined to be incompatible with the GPL some time ago.
>
> One of the goals of the GPL is to allow those who receive software to
> fix it and distribute those fixes.  That goal is not compatible with
> "you can't change it w/o also renaming it".
>
> The debian-legal list's archives are probably the best place to read
> about it.  The FSF, I think, also has a relevant, archived list.
>
> That incompatibility was an issue for TeX; DEK's license for TeX,
> metarfont and the CM fonts included such a clause.
>
> IIRC Don agreed to some slight change to get past that issue.  I suspect
> something along the lines of "if you change it w/o renaming it then you
> have to acknowledge that you did so" instead of the original language.
>
> So, to be GPL compatible, you have to allow changes w/o requiring
> renaming, but you can require that any changes be declared.

Given the permissiveness of the ICC license I find that statemnt not 
adequate. The ICC license allowes to modify the ICC profiles.

But with almost all modifications to a ICC profile the profile ID changes 
inherently. In that respect is is not like a program. So the ICC profile 
is not longer the original profile and thus the requirement has to be meet 
to avoid confusion. The whole issue is more compareable to cryptography. 
No one is going to "fix" a public SSH key and claim that is still that 
public key, which belonging to the original person. Such a behaviour is 
labeld fraud or naivity.

We have to ensure that ICC profile can be used and distributed together 
with GPLed software like SSH keys.


kind regards
Kai-Uwe Behrmann
-- 
developing for colour management 
www.behrmann.name + www.oyranos.org