Possible licensing issue with TCL and TK, and potentially GTK+.

Possible licensing issue with TCL and TK, and potentially GTK+.

[youlysses]

While lurking in #gnu on freenode, I was made aware that there is some
uncertainty in-regards to the way Tcl, Tk, and now, how some parts of GTK+
are licensed and specifically, if a certain disclaimer, invalidates these
as a free software. The full license is located here:
http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/license.html

The part which seems to be causing the concern is as follows:

"GOVERNMENT USE: If you are acquiring this software on behalf of the U.S.
government, the Government shall have only "Restricted Rights" in the
software and related documentation as defined in the Federal Acquisition
Regulations (FARs) in Clause 52.227.19 (c) (2). If you are acquiring the
software on behalf of the Department of Defense, the software shall be
classified as "Commercial Computer Software" and the Government shall have
only "Restricted Rights" as defined in Clause 252.227-7013 (c) (1) of
DFARs. Notwithstanding the foregoing, the authors grant the U.S.
Government and others acting in its behalf permission to use and
distribute the software in accordance with the terms specified in this
license."


Here's a link to the GTK+ repo: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/tree/gtk
What follows, is all the known files, which share this license header:
allgtktextchild.c, gtktextattributes.h, gtktextmark.h, gtktextdisplay.h,
gtktextchildprivate.h, gtktexttag.h, gtktexttag.c, gtktextlayout.h,
gtktextmark.c, gtktextdisplay.c, gtktextlayout.c, gtktextattributes.c,
gtktextbtree.c, gtktextsegment.c


Was anyone aware of this and knows something I'm missing, or is this
something we should be contacting the FSF about?  If it really is a
non-free license, there are 2-3 pieces of proprietary software via the
Guix distro, right-now... which is obviously not ideal.

Hoping to have his fears eased
-- Joshua S. Grant

Re: Possible licensing issue with TCL and TK, and potentially GTK+.

[Ludovic Courtès]

youlysses@riseup.net skribis:

> While lurking in #gnu on freenode, I was made aware that there is some
> uncertainty in-regards to the way Tcl, Tk, and now, how some parts of GTK+
> are licensed and specifically, if a certain disclaimer, invalidates these
> as a free software. The full license is located here:
> http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/license.html

The current consensus is that this a free software license, as per
<http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Tcl_Tk> (though it’s not listed on
<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html>.)

If you think there’s a problem with this license, please bring it up on
the gnu-linux-libre@nongnu.org mailing list, possibly escalating to
licensing@fsf.org if people agree that there is doubt.

Let us know here what conclusions people draw, and we’ll act accordingly.

Thanks!

Ludo’.