Clarify extcmd.c license

[ghost]

Regarding this comment in extcmd.c:

The code of this module
    is NOT covered by GPL; it can be used under the terms of the FORM 
    License http://www.nikhef.nl/~form/license.html

Is this comment still valid after the file was rewritten by M. Tentyukov in 2006? If so I think it may prevent FORM from being packaged for free software package repositories. The above link no longer works, but accessing it through an archive shows terms 2 and 3 are non-free.

Would it be possible for the comment to be removed if it is no longer valid, or update COPYING to reflect the non-free components so package maintainers are aware? Thank you.

[tueda]

Thank you for pointing it out.

This comment was introduced in the commit https://github.com/vermaseren/form/commit/bd7f0b536ddf167701134febec12b9a1b0dbbcd9 by Misha Tentyukov in 2004. At that time, FORM adopted the old FORM licence. I guess he wanted to explicitly declare that the code was covered by the old FORM licence, instead of the GPL2 that was adopted in the DIANA project (clone). Because the whole FORM source code licence has been changed from the old FORM licence to the GPL3-or-later since in 2010 (https://github.com/vermaseren/form/compare/079398e...3ed0a65), I think this comment in extcmd.c is invalid and the sentence should be removed.

@vermaseren Jos, am I right?

For reference: the old FORM license (in the Internet Archive):

• https://web.archive.org/web/20060924081011/http://www.nikhef.nl:80/~form/license.html

[vermaseren]

I think you got it right. The file extcmd.c was made by Misha Tentyukov and has basically never been tampered much by others. We switched to the GPL3 on the advise of Jens Vollinga who did not like the Form license very much and according to him it was incompatible with the GPL. It is clear that we forgot to take out that commentary in extcmd.c because at the time nobody in the team felt responsible for it. I just hope there are no more of those comments around. Maybe we can mention somewhere that the GPL holds for all the Form sources and any mention of the Fprm license should by now be considered obsolete and invalid.

On 22 Dec 2022, at 10:40, Takahiro Ueda @.***> wrote:

Thank you for pointing it out.

This comment was introduced in the commit bd7f0b5 https://github.com/vermaseren/form/commit/bd7f0b536ddf167701134febec12b9a1b0dbbcd9 by Misha Tentyukov in 2004. At that time, FORM adopted the old FORM licence. I guess he wanted to explicitly declare that the code was covered by the old FORM licence, instead of the GPL2 that was adopted in the DIANA project (clone https://github.com/apik/diana). Because the whole FORM source code licence has been changed from the old FORM licence to the GPL3-or-later since in 2010 (079398e...3ed0a65 https://github.com/vermaseren/form/compare/079398e...3ed0a65), I think this comment in extcmd.c is invalid and the sentence should be removed.

@vermaseren https://github.com/vermaseren Jos, am I right?

For reference: the old FORM license (in the Internet Archive):

https://web.archive.org/web/20060924081011/http://www.nikhef.nl:80/~form/license.html — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/vermaseren/form/issues/431#issuecomment-1362620960, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABJPCESS5EQPWMMWS5I5443WOQOZ7ANCNFSM6AAAAAATGBK6BM. You are receiving this because you were mentioned.

[tueda]

Thanks for the explanation. It seems that this sentence is the only one that mentions the old FORM license:

$ rg'form/license'
sources/extcmd.c
40:     License http://www.nikhef.nl/~form/license.html

I will push a commit to remove this sentence from the commentary in extcmd.c.