NASM Public Licence - What do you guys think?

[kmself at ix.netcom.com]

On Mon, Sep 04, 2000 at 04:04:34PM -0500, Nelson Rush wrote:
> The following link is for the NASM Licence under which The Netwide Assembler
> is licensed. I'd like to get the opinion of this list on whether it is safe
> to develop under this licence or not?
> 
> http://nasm.sourceforge.net/licence.txt

There appears to be no obligation to distribute sources under this
license.  It is a free-distribution license, not a free software
license.  It appears to be trying to be an LGPL-ish library license.

Section IV is gratuitous -- authors can grant additional licensing terms
independently of what a license may state.

Section VIII may not be sufficient for disclaimer of warrantee.  MY
UNDERSTANDING IS THAT SUCH CLAUSES MUST BE IN UPPERCASE TEXT TO MAKE
THEM STAND OUT PROMINANTLY IN A LICENSING AGREEMENT.  This may have
liability consequences to developers distributing software under this
license.

Without knowing more of the objectives of the organization and the
reasons for choosing to create a new license, I cannot comment further.
I strongly prefer using an existing license to creating a new one.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>     http://www.netcom.com/~kmself
 Evangelist, Opensales, Inc.                    http://www.opensales.org
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   http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/    K5: http://www.kuro5hin.org
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