Geant4 Licence and binary distributability

[Joshua Root]

On 2013-7-8 04:07 , Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I need some help with the Geant4 licence. Currently the string
> "Geant4" is used for the following licence:
>     http://geant4.cern.ch/license/LICENSE.htm
> 
> The first trivial question and not a really important one is that:
>     port lint --nitpick science/*
> reports
>     Error: invalid license 'Geant4': missing hyphen before version
> I know that this is not something that I should really worry about,
> but if anyone has something to add, comments are welcome. (Should
> licence be renamed? Should nitpick be more tolerant? Should I simply
> ignore this?)
> 
> The second question for someone more familiar with the licensing: does
> the above text allow binary distribution?

"Installation, use, reproduction, display, modification and
redistribution of this software, with or without modification, in source
and *binary* forms, are permitted on a non- exclusive basis." (My emphasis.)

> And finally: In case it does, does MacPorts core need any additional
> code to recognise the licence as free? Bradley Giesbrecht suggested to
> use "permissive" licence rather than "Geant4" to allow binary
> packages.

Be careful not to conflate "free", "permissive", and "distributable".
This is certainly not as permissive as MIT or BSD, and it looks to me
like it would conflict with the GPL. Debian agrees:

<http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/Geant4>

- Josh