ARToolKit licence - "non-commercial use" phrase

Ian Jackson ijackson at chiark.greenend.org.uk
Wed Sep 29 13:07:25 UTC 2010


The website
  http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/

gives the following licensing notice:

  IMPORTANT NOTICE REGARDING YOUR RIGHT TO USE ARTOOLKIT:

  ARToolKit is made available freely for non-commercial use under the
  GNU General Public License. Commercial licenses to a professional
  implementation of ARToolKit are available for users for whom the GPL
  is not suitable, or who require a higher level of support, or who
  require customization or other specialist modifictions. Commercial
  licenses are administered by ARToolworks, Inc., Seattle, WA,
  USA. Click here for more information on ARToolKit licenses and your
  usage options. 

Limiting the GPL version to "non-commercial use" means that the
toolkit is not really GPL'd and not really free software.  This is
clearly dealt with on the licensing page:
  http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/license.html

So the first web page could do with an improvement.  I suggest
replacing "non-commercial" in that paragraph with "Open Source".

The same mistake is in the README.txt of the source distribution.

This has caused some confusion on the OSI lists.  I think you need to
clear this up because as it is it is not 100% clear that the terms of
the GPL distribution are intended to be exactly the GPL - ie, without
any additional "only for non-commercial use" restriction.

Can you please look into this and get back to me ?

Ian.



More information about the License-discuss mailing list