What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted May 30, 2017 19:29 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413)
In reply to: What's new in gnuplot 5.2 by k8to
Parent article: What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Self-correction, the gnuplot license follows with:

> Modifications are to be distributed as patches to the released version.

I suppose this preserves all freedoms, just not with convenience.

What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted May 30, 2017 19:46 UTC (Tue) by leephillips (subscriber, #100450) [Link] (2 responses)

"I suppose this preserves all freedoms, just not with convenience."

I suppose it does, at least in the opinion of the FSF (see my link above). Note also that the FSF used to actually distribute gnuplot.

"A subset of gnuplot is still effectively under the GPL, because it originally was licensed as such"

This doesn't sound likely. The first version of the GPL was disseminated in 1989¹. Gnuplot was publicly released in 1986 (as far as I can tell).

¹https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copying-1.0.html

What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted May 30, 2017 20:47 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Sure enough. I misinterpreted the scenario of "gnuplot is not distributed as a whole under the GPL" or similar, combined with the current copyright file comments in the faq.

It seems that the GPL components are recent dual-licensed additions (for some values of recent.)

What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted May 30, 2017 20:51 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

For anyone interested, this is far more authoritative than any of the thread so far, or at least more authoritative than my guesswork.

https://lwn.net/Articles/486466/

What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted May 31, 2017 1:53 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

FYI, the DFSG have a clause that was specifically designed for these kind of licenses:

https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines

What's new in gnuplot 5.2

Posted Jun 1, 2017 2:20 UTC (Thu) by rav (guest, #89256) [Link]

Luckily you can just release your modifications using a distributed source code control system such as Git which makes it easy* to view and work with the officially released version alongside the patches.