RE: Open Letter to Octave Community

[Carmine Napolitano]

We believe we expressly provided a "carve out" for open source licenses with
the following sentence under the Use of Material From This Site:

" Occasionally, material within the Site which is designated C Equalis LLC
may also be designated as distributable under special license terms (for
example a General Public License (GPL) or CeCiLL2
license). Such material is exempt from the general restrictions outlined
above and is instead subject to the specific terms of the referenced
license."

As I mentioned in our letter, it is our intention to maintain
non-corruptible licenses.  Also to my letter, we're happy making changes
that make the Octave community feel more comfortable.  We've spent a bit of
energy discussing the terms and that's important.  

Assuming we square away the TOS, I'd like to try and get a sense from the
key players in the Octave community as to whether you would get behind what
we are trying to do and leverage the platform as an enabler to fostering
collaboration among Octave users, maintainers, and potential users.  If
there's no enthusiasm in what we are doing then there's no reason to keep
going down this road regarding the TOS.  Your Agora project looks exciting.
Yes there's a lot of overlap between Agora and what we're offering.  Two big
differences:  you can leverage our platform today and we are actively
developing new features (I mentioned a file/code exchange in my letter among
others).  In summary, we would be excited to have you join us, but it takes
two to tango.

Regards,
Carmine

-----Original Message-----
From: Judd Storrs [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2010 6:15 PM
To: address@hidden
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: Open Letter to Octave Community

On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 6:45 PM, Carmine Napolitano <address@hidden>
wrote:
> Are you asking whether Equalis claims the right to relicense GPL code
> submitted by other users under some other license other than GPL?

Yes, this is my question. My concern relates to this passage of the
Terms of Use in the "Material You Submit" section:

"by submitting User Submissions to this Site, and unless we indicate
otherwise, you grant Equalis and its affiliates a nonexclusive,
royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable and fully sub-licensable right to
use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative
works from, distribute and display such User Submissions throughout
the world in any media now known or hereafter invented."

The sticking point for me is the meaning of "fully sub-licensable",
which at face value seems to not be compatible with the GPL. The GPL
places certain important restrictions and obligations on conveyance
and on creation of derivative works. In that light, "fully
sub-licensable" seems to remove these obligations and restrictions
from Equalis and its affiliates?


--judd