ncurses licensing questions

[Daniel Drake]

Hi,

For reference, here's the ncurses license:

> Copyright (c) 1998-2003,2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> 
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
> copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
> "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
> without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
> distribute, distribute with modifications, sublicense, and/or sell
> copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
> furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
> 
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
> in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
> 
> THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS
> OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
> MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
> IN NO EVENT SHALL THE ABOVE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM,
> DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR
> OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR
> THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
> 
> Except as contained in this notice, the name(s) of the above copyright
> holders shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the
> sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written
> authorization.

I have some questions about binary distribution. I'm working under the
assumption that compiling the ncurses source files into an ELF dynamic
shared object still constitutes as "the Software" or a copy of it.

The license states that the copryight and permission notices shall be
included in the software. What does this mean?

I note that with a standard out-of-the-box compile, the license text
does not get included in the final libncurses.so.5 binary. Is
distributing such a binary regarded as a violation of the license?

The context of my particular scenario is that we will be shipping a
preconfigured computer system to customers, and the system will include
a precompiled version of ncurses. The only software exposed to the user
is NOT linked against ncurses and does not use ncurses at all, but
ncurses does remain on the system (as you know it's used by a lot of
very standard utilities which would be a real pain to rip out).

Would including a printed copy of the license terms in the documentation
satisfy the licensing terms? The documentation is still a part of the
overall system.

We do have a continued interest in remaining friendly to open source
communities and licenses for other packages we ship do require source
code redistribution. As a result we'll probably end up just shipping the
source code for ncurses separately (corresponding to the compiled
version shipped no the system) anyway -- we have no intention of being
bad citizens, but it would be good to get the license text clarified.

Thanks!
Daniel Drake