OpenVMS Community License

[Rico Pajarola]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 8:06 AM Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> >                                     One could make a case that the
> > wording of the license is imprecise enough
>
> The wording is only imprecise to those who do not wish to follow it.
> It is, by far, the cleanest and plainest written Hobbyist License I
> have ever seen.

IANAL, but I'm married to one... just pointing out that "clear language"
does not mean the same thing to lawyers as it does to us engineers.
"software owned by Digital Equipment Corporation" is pretty vague as far as
lawyer-speak goes. The license does not seem to specifically include or
exclude alternative scenarios. Anyone, especially a non-lawyer who was not
involved with the drafting of the license, and says "obviously that must
mean X" is just making stuff up (it doesn't matter what X is. Notice that
I'm not saying it means you can use it under this license. I don't know,
and IANAL). It's like undefined behaviour in C. You can make an educated
guess (given additional information you have, such as history,
correspondence with Mentec about the topic etc.), and you might be right,
but the only way to find out for sure is to run the compiler and look at
the disassembly, i.e. force a clarification from Mentec.