Geant4 Licence and binary distributability

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 2:14 PM, Joshua Root wrote:
> On 2013-7-8 18:39 , Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>> On Sun, Jul 7, 2013 at 11:22 PM, Joshua Root wrote:
>>>
>>> Be careful not to conflate "free", "permissive", and "distributable".
>>
>> Like Ryan said: I have no idea what each term means and I'm not an
>> expert (and don't want to be).
>
> Getting this stuff wrong potentially causes us to break the law. You
> don't have to be a legal expert, and I'm certainly not one, but you do
> need to at least read and understand the software's license, and make
> some effort to think through its implications, before you set the
> license field in a portfile.
>
> "Free" has no special meaning for us and is kind of a fuzzy term in
> general use. "Distributable" simply means that we are allowed to
> distribute binaries. That's not used in the license field, because
> whether we can distribute a port depends on its dependencies' licenses
> as well as the port's own.
>
> "Permissive" for us roughly means a license that has no more
> restrictions than the MIT/X11, (new) BSD, or zlib licenses. Because it's
> a general category rather than a specific license, it shouldn't be used
> for any license that conflicts with another license, since those
> conflicts will be specific to that one license and not the entire category.
>
>>> This is certainly not as permissive as MIT or BSD, and it looks to me
>>> like it would conflict with the GPL. Debian agrees:
>>
>> So in short: Should I use one of those terms (say, "distributable", if
>> permissive is not appropriate) or should MacPorts core know about the
>> Geant licence?
>
> Not sure. At worst you could probably call it Restrictive/Distributable.

I checked the binary distributability with
    port_binary_distributable.tcl -v geant4.9.6

It turns out that iAIDA's dependency grace->pdflib makes iAIDA
nondistributable, but iAIDA doesn't seem to be required for Geant4 any
more. (On the other hand Geant4 doesn't provide any switch to turn it
on or off - it's used if it's found.)

If I remove iAIDA from the list of dependencies then:
- "Permissive" lincence allows distributability of Geant4
- "Restrictive/Distributable" licence prevents distributability
because of root's dependency on gsl which is 'GPL-3+'

I tried to remove +gsl from Root and then it would be stuck at
root->graphviz->gts->jbigkit. So after removing "+gsl +graphviz" from
root and removing "iAIDA" from Geant4, Geant4 becomes binary
distributable if "Restrictive/Distributable" licence is used.

The reason why I'm so concerned about binary distributability is
because it takes ages to compile Geant4 (I think it's 40 minutes on 2
core 2,26 MHz laptop).

But I guess that there is not much that could be done in this case?

Mojca