Dear Kevin,

(I Cc: several people involved in this, also the X2Go development
mailing list...)

[If you feel unconfortable with discussing the details / the impact of
the below in public, feel free to answer to me directly first with
questions and concerns, before answering to all people who are listed
in Cc:.]

Someone from the Debian legal team recently brought up a license issue
discovered in nx-libs 3.x series.

TL;DR; Suggested by Francesco Poli from the Debian legal team: """ (A) someone gets in touch with DXPC copyright owners and asks them whether the re-licensing [in 2002] may be considered retroactive
(applicable to older versions of DXPC); in case the answer is negative, DXPC copyright owners should be persuaded to make the re-licensing retroactive """

The person contacting you about the above question is me. Mike
Gabriel, Debian Developer and one of the current upstream maintainers
of nx-libs 3.x (previously also know as "NX redistributed" for X2Go)
[1].

This issue requires some time of reading from you and (hopefully) a
public statement, that the original DXPC code can be considered as
BSD-2-clause (the current license) also for released versions prior
2002 when the ancient BSD license template [2] was still shipped with
DXPC.

For a complete follow-up, please check Debian bug #784565 [3].

We are aware that NoMachine forked DXPC at some early stage around the
year 2000 and wrote their own commercial product around it. Obviously,
this fork happened before 2002 (i.e., before DXPC release 3.8.1), as
libxcomp3 in NoMachine's NX ships the previously used BSD license
template. I am not sure, if that fork was easy for you or actually a
nuisance. I may only guess at this point. I'd be happy to know more
(maybe not in this mail thread, though).

NoMachine has stopped publishing NXv3 updates a couple of years ago
(2011 IIRC), now. The maintenance has been moved into the hands of the
currently available FLOSS projects "X2Go", "Arctica Project" [NEW] and
"TheQVD". Some of us are running a business model on top of that
(consultancy, support contracts, feature development contracts), some
of us spend a lot of their free time on improving / maintaining
nx-libs (as we call NoMachine's NXv3 at the moment).

To outline the impact of my mail clearly: If you say that it was not
legal by NoMachine to fork DXPC at the given time (before 2002), then
all FLOSS remote desktop / remote application would be in real
trouble, because then the core component of their software projects
could not be considered as free (as in DFSG, Debian free software
guidelines[4]) anymore. Also the code changes originally performed by
NoMachine might have been illegal in the first place. All current
maintenance activities and also planned future development on nx-libs
would become questionable.

Thus, I hope you can chime in on this: Dear developers of nx-libs,
please assume the BSD-2-license as retroactive and applicable to DXPC
version earlier than 3.8.1. As the copyright holder, I agree with
modifications of code bases that originate before the change to
BSD-2-clause license got introduced in 3.8.1 of DXPC.

And... I will bring up that question later (but it is burning under my
nails)... Be sure: The nx-libs maintainers would be happy to have the
original DXPC author on the nx-libs developer team. But I will bring
up that question later (when this very issue is settled). ;-)

Greets, Mike

[1] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#Previous_license [3] http://bugs.debian.org/784565 [4] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines

On Mo 11 Mai 2015 21:36:59 CEST, Francesco Poli wrote:

On Mon, 11 May 2015 09:26:36 +0000 Mike Gabriel wrote:

[...]

...

As it seems, dxpc has been long ago relicensed to BSD-2-clause (for v3.8.1 in/around 2002).

This is great news, indeed!

...

I have no exact clue, if NoMachine forked prior to that (if they quote the old licensing terms, then probably they did).

Yep, it's plausible...

...

However, how do you see the situation considering that upstream changed to BSD-2-clause a long time ago. What approach do you propose for nx-libs-lite to get the issue fully fixed?

If the fork has been performed before the DXPC re-licensing (as it's likely), I see two possible strategies:

(A) someone gets in touch with DXPC copyright owners and asks them whether the re-licensing may be considered retroactive (applicable to older versions of DXPC); in case the answer is negative, DXPC copyright owners should be persuaded to make the re-licensing retroactive

(B) nx-libs-lite upstream developers re-fork from scratch, basing the new code on a BSD-licensed version of DXPC (I suspect this may turn out to be somewhat painful...)

Obviously, the optimal solution is (A). I hope it may work...

Thanks for your time and for your prompt and kind replies.

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Hi Kevin,

thanks for your feedback. Let us wait for Francesco, our expert on license issues, and see what he thinks about your feedback.

Thank you very much for providing info and sharing pieces of nx-libs's history.

As you sent your reply to the Debian bug tracker already, this will public statement enough, I guess.

Thanks a lot, Mike

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GnuPG Key ID 0x25771B13 mail: mike.gabriel@das-netzwerkteam.de, http://das-netzwerkteam.de

----- Original message -----

Hi Mike, et al,

        I am not the original author of dxpc, that being Brian Pane. However, I took over maintenance circa 1999 and am still the primary maintainer (though the project has effectively been dead for most of a decade now).

        As you are aware, when I inherited the code, it was licensed under a variant of the BSD license that did not include the 'with modification' clause. To the best of my recollection, somebody from the FSF contacted me circa 2001 regarding this and as a result, subsequent releases were done under a standard 2-clause BSD license with the modification clause. Again, to the best of my recollection, I contacted Brian about this change and he offered no objection.

        Further, I recall distinctly that NoMachine contacted me and explicitly asked permission before including DXPC code in NX, which I happily granted with no new conditions beyond the BSD license already in play.

        It is possible, though by no means certain, that I could dig up ancient email to corroborate this account if necessary. However, I am more than willing to publicly state that I believe NoMachine's use of DXPC code to be both legal and ethical, and that my intent when changing the license to 2-clause BSD was simply to clarity the existing intent and that it ought therefore be considered retroactive.

        Yours, Kevin Vigor

On 05/11/15 22:46, Mike Gabriel wrote:

...

Dear Kevin,

(I Cc: several people involved in this, also the X2Go development mailing list...)

[If you feel unconfortable with discussing the details / the impact of the below in public, feel free to answer to me directly first with questions and concerns, before answering to all people who are listed in Cc:.]

Someone from the Debian legal team recently brought up a license issue discovered in nx-libs 3.x series.

TL;DR; Suggested by Francesco Poli from the Debian legal team: """ (A) someone gets in touch with DXPC copyright owners and asks them whether the re-licensing [in 2002] may be considered retroactive (applicable to older versions of DXPC); in case the answer is negative, DXPC copyright owners should be persuaded to make the re-licensing retroactive """

The person contacting you about the above question is me. Mike Gabriel, Debian Developer and one of the current upstream maintainers of nx-libs 3.x (previously also know as  "NX redistributed" for X2Go) [1].

This issue requires some time of reading from you and (hopefully) a public statement, that the original DXPC code can be considered as BSD-2-clause (the current license) also for released versions prior 2002 when the ancient BSD license template [2] was still shipped with DXPC.

For a complete follow-up, please check Debian bug #784565 [3].

We are aware that NoMachine forked DXPC at some early stage around the year 2000 and wrote their own commercial product around it. Obviously, this fork happened before 2002 (i.e., before DXPC release 3.8.1), as libxcomp3 in NoMachine's NX ships the previously used BSD license template. I am not sure, if that fork was easy for you or actually a nuisance. I may only guess at this point. I'd be happy to know more (maybe not in this mail thread, though).

NoMachine has stopped publishing NXv3 updates a couple of years ago (2011 IIRC), now. The maintenance has been moved into the hands of the currently available FLOSS projects "X2Go", "Arctica Project" [NEW] and "TheQVD". Some of us are running a business model on top of that (consultancy, support contracts, feature development contracts), some of us spend a lot of their free time on improving / maintaining nx-libs (as we call NoMachine's NXv3 at the moment).

To outline the impact of my mail clearly: If you say that it was not legal by NoMachine to fork DXPC at the given time (before 2002), then all FLOSS remote desktop / remote application would be in real trouble, because then the core component of their software projects could not be considered as free (as in DFSG, Debian free software guidelines[4]) anymore. Also the code changes originally performed by NoMachine might have been illegal in the first place. All current maintenance activities and also planned future development on nx-libs would become questionable.

Thus, I hope you can chime in on this: Dear developers of nx-libs, please assume the BSD-2-license as retroactive and applicable to DXPC version earlier than 3.8.1. As the copyright holder, I agree with modifications of code bases that originate before the change to BSD-2-clause license got introduced in 3.8.1 of DXPC.

And... I will bring up that question later (but it is burning under my nails)... Be sure: The nx-libs maintainers would be happy to have the original DXPC author on the nx-libs developer team. But I will bring up that question later (when this very issue is settled). ;-)

Greets, Mike

[1] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#Previous_license [3] http://bugs.debian.org/784565 [4] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines

On  Mo 11 Mai 2015 21:36:59 CEST, Francesco Poli wrote:

...

On Mon, 11 May 2015 09:26:36 +0000 Mike Gabriel wrote:

[...]

...

As it seems, dxpc has been long ago relicensed to BSD-2-clause (for v3.8.1 in/around 2002).

This is great news, indeed!

...

I have no exact clue, if NoMachine forked prior to that (if they quote the old licensing terms, then probably they did).

Yep, it's plausible...

...

However, how do you see the situation considering that upstream changed to BSD-2-clause a long time ago. What approach do you propose for nx-libs-lite to get the issue fully fixed?

If the fork has been performed before the DXPC re-licensing (as it's likely), I see two possible strategies:

(A) someone gets in touch with DXPC copyright owners and asks them whether the re-licensing may be considered retroactive (applicable to older versions of DXPC); in case the answer is negative, DXPC copyright owners should be persuaded to make the re-licensing retroactive

(B) nx-libs-lite upstream developers re-fork from scratch, basing the new code on a BSD-licensed version of DXPC (I suspect this may turn out to be somewhat painful...)

Obviously, the optimal solution is (A). I hope it may work...

Thanks for your time and for your prompt and kind replies.

Hi all,

there has been an off-list mail exchange between Francesco and Kevin
(and me in Cc:) which I will quote at the end of this mail (as it was
not meant to be private and we should fully document the flow on this
issue).

@Kevin: I will take you off this mail thread's Cc: field with my next
post. Feel free to follow-up via #784565 [1] on the Debian bug
tracker. Thanks a lot for being so responsive and generous with
providing information.

On Di 12 Mai 2015 23:40:48 CEST, Francesco Poli wrote:

On Tue, 12 May 2015 17:41:55 +0200 Mike Gabriel wrote:

I think that now it would be useful to ascertain that the other copyright owners (Brian Pane, Zachary Vonler, Gian Filippo Pinzari) are also OK with this interpretation of the re-licensing operation.

As stated by Kevin, Gian Filippo worked/works on the NoMachine side. I
will include him in Cc:.

For Brian Pane we also found and e-Mail address, for Zach Vonler, I
will use the mail address provided in DXPC code (which might be
outdated), but I think I actually have found his phone number on the
web, so if that mail address bounces I will give him a ring.

Maybe Kevin is able to dig the original conversations (assuming they were carried on by e-mail or similar archived means) or otherwise to get in touch with them and check? Or, alternatively, Kevin could help

As stated in the forwarded messages below, Kevin was unable to dig out
any mails from backups. So we switch to plan B: contact Brian, Zach
and Gian Filippo.

Mike to get in touch with them?

I will do that.

I hope everything may be settled for the best soon. Thanks a lot to everyone involved.

/me, too.

light+love Mike

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/784565

----- Weitergeleitete Nachricht von Kevin Vigor <kevin@vigor.nu> ----- Datum: Wed, 13 May 2015 09:01:27 -0600 Von: Kevin Vigor <kevin@vigor.nu> Betreff: Re: [pkg-x2go-devel] Bug#784565: nx-libs-lite: parts are
derived from non-free code An: Francesco Poli <invernomuto@paranoici.org> Cc: Mike Gabriel <mike.gabriel@das-netzwerkteam.de>

On 05/12/15 15:40, Francesco Poli wrote:

Maybe Kevin is able to dig the original conversations (assuming they were carried on by e-mail or similar archived means) or otherwise to get in touch with them and check? Or, alternatively, Kevin could help Mike to get in touch with them?

I'm afraid I was not able to dig anything out of old backups last
night. I still have a stack of CDs to look through, but don't hold
your breath. Sorry about that.

I have never had any contact with Zachary Vonler or Gian Filippo
Pinzari, and have not spoken with Brian Pane in many years, so I have
no recent contact information for any of them. However, a quick google
turns up:

https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=728859 http://www.brianp.net/contact/

which is almost certainly the right Brian Pane (he was at CNet at the
proper time).

Good luck,
      Kevin

----- Ende der weitergeleiteten Nachricht -----

----- Weitergeleitete Nachricht von Francesco Poli
<invernomuto@paranoici.org> ----- Datum: Wed, 13 May 2015 19:43:44 +0200 Von: Francesco Poli <invernomuto@paranoici.org> Betreff: Re: [pkg-x2go-devel] Bug#784565: nx-libs-lite: parts are
derived from non-free code An: Kevin Vigor <kevin@vigor.nu> Cc: Mike Gabriel <mike.gabriel@das-netzwerkteam.de>

On Wed, 13 May 2015 09:01:27 -0600 Kevin Vigor wrote:

On 05/12/15 15:40, Francesco Poli wrote:

...

Maybe Kevin is able to dig the original conversations (assuming they were carried on by e-mail or similar archived means) or otherwise to get in touch with them and check? Or, alternatively, Kevin could help Mike to get in touch with them?

I'm afraid I was not able to dig anything out of old backups last
night. I still have a stack of CDs to look through, but don't hold
your breath. Sorry about that.

Thanks a lot for searching: this is really appreciated, at least from my side.

I have never had any contact with Zachary Vonler or Gian Filippo Pinzari,

Then I wonder how it was possible to re-license DXPC in 2002... :-|

and have not spoken with Brian Pane in many years, so I have no recent contact information for any of them. However, a quick google turns up:

https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=728859 http://www.brianp.net/contact/

which is almost certainly the right Brian Pane (he was at CNet at
the proper time).

This could be really useful, thank you very much!

Mike, I hope the search may go on from there: Brian should be asked about the retroactive nature of the re-licensing of DXPC and maybe he also knows how to get in touch with Zachary and/or Gian Filippo...

P.S.: Kevin, any special reason why you dropped several addresses from the Cc list? Should this part of our conversation be kept private for the time being? Please clarify. Thanks!

----- Ende der weitergeleiteten Nachricht -----

----- Weitergeleitete Nachricht von Kevin Vigor <kevin@vigor.nu> ----- Datum: Wed, 13 May 2015 14:08:48 -0600 Von: Kevin Vigor <kevin@vigor.nu> Betreff: Re: [pkg-x2go-devel] Bug#784565: nx-libs-lite: parts are
derived from non-free code An: Francesco Poli <invernomuto@paranoici.org> Cc: Mike Gabriel <mike.gabriel@das-netzwerkteam.de>

On 05/13/15 11:43, Francesco Poli wrote:

On Wed, 13 May 2015 09:01:27 -0600 Kevin Vigor wrote:

...

I have never had any contact with Zachary Vonler or Gian Filippo Pinzari,

Then I wonder how it was possible to re-license DXPC in 2002... :-|

I believe Gian worked on the NoMachine code; he has never contributed
to DXPC directly.

Zachary Vonler was allegedly the maintainer of DXPC for a while circa
1999, but never responded to any email when I attempted to contact
him, which is how I came to take over maintenance.

P.S.: Kevin, any special reason why you dropped several addresses from the Cc list? Should this part of our conversation be kept private for the time being? Please clarify. Thanks!

No, I was just trying to keep from spamming email lists unnecessarily.
I do not consider any part of this conversation private.

----- Ende der weitergeleiteten Nachricht -----

----- Weitergeleitete Nachricht von Francesco Poli
<invernomuto@paranoici.org> ----- Datum: Wed, 13 May 2015 22:50:32 +0200 Von: Francesco Poli <invernomuto@paranoici.org> Betreff: Re: [pkg-x2go-devel] Bug#784565: nx-libs-lite: parts are
derived from non-free code An: Kevin Vigor <kevin@vigor.nu> Cc: Mike Gabriel <mike.gabriel@das-netzwerkteam.de>

On Wed, 13 May 2015 14:08:48 -0600 Kevin Vigor wrote:

On 05/13/15 11:43, Francesco Poli wrote:

...

On Wed, 13 May 2015 09:01:27 -0600 Kevin Vigor wrote:

...

...

I have never had any contact with Zachary Vonler or Gian Filippo Pinzari,

Then I wonder how it was possible to re-license DXPC in 2002... :-|

I believe Gian worked on the NoMachine code; he has never
contributed to DXPC directly.

Good, then only Zachary has to be tracked down.

Zachary Vonler was allegedly the maintainer of DXPC for a while
circa 1999, but never responded to any email when I attempted to
contact him, which is how I came to take over maintenance.

Let's hope Brian is able to help Mike in getting in touch with Zachary...

...

P.S.: Kevin, any special reason why you dropped several addresses from the Cc list? Should this part of our conversation be kept private for the time being? Please clarify. Thanks!

No, I was just trying to keep from spamming email lists
unnecessarily. I do not consider any part of this conversation
private.

OK, thanks for clarifying.

----- Ende der weitergeleiteten Nachricht -----

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On 05/16/15 03:19, Mike Gabriel wrote: As I have not heard back neither from Brian Pane, Zachary Vonler nor Gian Filippo Pinzari (we had Ascension Day and maybe a prolonged weekend that people used for going on VAC), I will try looking at the DXPC changes between 3.7.0 and 3.8.1. Obviously, NoMachine forked NXCOMP from DXPC some time between DXPC 3.7.0 and DXPC 3.8.0.

Questions to Kevin:

o Is there any SVN upstream repo still online (I saw it in one of the tarballs, that SVN was used for 3.9.0).

I'm afraid not. There was never an online repo available, and if I used one personally it is lost to the mists of time.

o Do you have any tarballs documenting the changes between 3.7.0 and 3.8.0? Do you also have the 3.8.1 tarball?

I have the source tarballs to each of those (including the 3.8.1 version). The 3.8.0 release includes a README-3.8.0 file which documents the changes between 3.7.0 and 3.8.0 reasonably well.

As will be (unfortunately) obvious from examining the deltas between 3.7.0 (the last release by Brian and/or Zachary) and 3.8.0 (the first release by me), I inherited a significant majority of the code.

o Did the 3.8.0 version of DXPC break proto compatibility (i.e., you could not use client 3.7.0 and server 3.8.0 and vice versa with each other)?

Yes, minor version number bumps were used to indicate compatibility. 3.8.x was incompatible with 3.7.x (and also with 3.9.x).

Hi Kevin, hi Zach, hi Francesco, hi all,

@Francesco, please review the recent posts and sum up what to do next.

----- Original message -----

By the way, poking around the interwebs I find there is an archive of the old DXPC mailing list available at:

http://marc.info/?l=dxpc&r=1&w=2

I think you will find this of particular interest:

http://marc.info/?l=dxpc&m=93093790813555&w=2

List:            dxpc Subject:      Re: future tecnologies From:            Brian Pane <brianp () cnet ! com> Date:            1999-07-02 16:42:18 [Download message RAW]

Kevin Vigor <kvigor@eng.ascend.com> wrote:

...

On 01-Jul-99 dxpc@mcfeeley.cc.utexas.edu wrote:

...

Speaking of licensing, are you putting your 3.8.0 changes to the dxpc code itself under GPL, or are they going to use the original dxpc's licensing?

No, as you can probably guess, I am no fan of the GPL. For stuff on this level, where my hacking is pretty simple and probably devoid of commercial value, I'll just release my changes to the public domain and give up even a copyright interest in them.

Your and Zach's copyrights still stand, of course.

I *think* that fact that we use the LZO library and API, but do not directly incorporate the code, allows us to escape the clutch of the GPL virus.

btw, is there an original dxpc license? I haven't seen anything but a copyright notice, which to my non-lawyerly mind translates as "free to all the world as is, negotiate with copyright owner if modifying or including in some other product".

The copyright banner in the Readme is all the documentation there's ever been.  My intent was to allow _any_ distribution, use, and modification of the source, without imposing restrictions on the licensing style of any system into which others might incorporate the code.  We probably should start stating this clearly in the distributions.

-brian

[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]

@Kevin: You are very awesome!

@Francesco: that old post from Brian should be the statement we need, right? As Brian has not answered back, so far, does that post suffice?

I also had a mail from Zach in my mailbox this morning. I managed to get hold of him via phone over the weekend. He posted his agreement to this Debian bug (as message #77) [1] earlier today. @Zach: thanks a lot for that!!!

@Francesco: by looking at [2], I cannot see any hint for Gian Filippo Pinzari being a copyright holder of DXPC. This is stated in the NoMachine files at at least one place, but not in the latest DXPC upstream release. I am on my mobile right now, need to check old versions of DXPC, but if Gian Filippo Pinzari is not listed in the DXPC 3.7.0 release (where nxcomp obviously got forked from), then I think that we don't require his feedback, right?

To my opinion, this issue can be settled. We have direct feedback from Kevin and Zach and Kevin dug out an old post from Brian stating the retroactive nature of the BSD-2-clause while Gian Filippo probably not being a real copyright holder of the original DXPC code. Right?

light+love, Mike

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=77;att=0;bug=784565 [2] http://www.vigor.nu/dxpc/README

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GnuPG Key ID 0x25771B13 mail: mike.gabriel@das-netzwerkteam.de, http://das-netzwerkteam.de

On 5/18/2015 4:14 PM, Francesco Poli wrote:

If it is confirmed that Gian Filippo contributed to the forking of DXPC within the NoMachine project, but not directly to DXPC, then I think that he made his contributions available under the terms of the GPL v2 of the NoMachine project. If this is the case, no feedback should be required from his side. I can confirm that Gian Fillippo never contributed directly to DXPC. You'll note his name does not appear in the DXPC README, and never has.

On Tue, 19 May 2015 08:15:12 +0000 Mike Gabriel wrote:

[...]

@Frederico: I guess we are through then.

Yes, it seems so (I'm assuming you meant to direct this question to me...).

Thanks for helping with
clarifying the situation (and bringing it up in the first place).

You're welcome! Thanks to you and all the involved people for helping to solve this issue.

For fixing this issue (in terms of closing the bug), I propose this
for downstream (i.e., Debian):

o copy bug_784565.mbox [1] into the debian/ folder of the
nx-libs-lite package

Maybe the entire bug log is an overkill... I would include the relevant replies only. For instance: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=40;mbox=yes;bug=784565 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=77;mbox=yes;bug=784565 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=87;mbox=yes;bug=784565 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=102;mbox=yes;bug=784565

o upload some latest release of nx-libs-lite 3.5.0.x to unstable o update debian/copyright accordingly

In the debian/copyright file the license for the original DXPC code should be replaced with the 2-clause BSD license (currently adopted for DXPC) with a comment saying something like:

The original DXPC code used to be available under a license which failed to explicitly grant the permission to modify, but was later retroactively re-licensed under the 2-clause BSD license (see debian/bug_784565_*.mbox for the copyright owners' statements; see <https://bugs.debian.org/784565> for more details)

Moreover, the copyright notice of Gian Filippo Pinzari should be documented in some more appropriate part of the debian/copyright file, associated with the NoMachine license (GPL v2 or later).

o close this bug via debian/changelog

For upstream, I propose this:

o copy bug_784565.mbox into the docs/ folder

Again, I would not include the entire bug log, but only the relevant messages (see above)...

o update copyright information in nxcomp/ subfolder o provide some README or such that shortly explains our last weeks' process o this will be for the upcoming 3.6.x release series of nx-libs

o this should also be backported to the 3.5.x release series

Thanks to everyone involved! Bye.

-- http://www.inventati.org/frx/ There's not a second to spare! To the laboratory! ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == CA01 1147 9CD2 EFDF FB82 3925 3E1C 27E1 1F69 BFFE

Dear Brian, dear Zachary, dear Gian Filippo,

(Find a TL;DR; at the end of this mail...)

I am contacting you on a licensing issue related to the DXPC code that
you worked on at the end of the nineties. I'd highly appreciate it if
you could take a little time to read this mail and get back to me,
either privately or in public. [I have actually Cc:ed quite a number of people in this mail (thread).
All of them will be affected by the outcome of this license issue to
some lesser or greater extent. If you feel inconvenient with replying
to so many people you don't know, really don't hesitate to get back to
me in private first, so that we can sort things out. Thank you.]

Before I continue, let me shortly introduce myself. My name is Mike
Gabriel, I work for the Debian project [1.1, 1.2] (which brings forth
one of the major GNU/Linux distributions world-wide. I am also the
upstream code maintainer of a software project called nx-libs [2]. The
nx-libs code has been derived from several of NoMachine's NXv3 [11]
components (namely: nx-X11, nxagent, nxcomp, nxcompext and nxcompshad).

A member of the Debian legal team [3] (Francesco Poli) made us (i.e.,
the nx-libs developers, users, package maintainers) aware of an issue
[4] in the nx-libs component NXCOMP (which has been derived from DXPC
[5]). Please read Message #5 of the brought up issue on the Debian bug
tracker (#784565) [4] before you continue reading. Thanks.

I will now jump into the below quoted mail and continue inline...

On Di 12 Mai 2015 23:40:48 CEST, Francesco Poli wrote:

On Tue, 12 May 2015 17:41:55 +0200 Mike Gabriel wrote:

...

Hi Kevin,

Hello Mike, hello Kevin, hello to all the other recipients.

First of all, I wish to express my gratitude to Kevin for his prompt, kind and generous response.

...

thanks for your feedback. Let us wait for Francesco, our expert on
license issues, and see what he thinks about your feedback.

I think that this is an important first step to solve this issue for the best. Kevin Vigor is one of the copyright owners of the code that was forked before the re-licensing. We now know that he intended the re-licensing to be retroactive and this is really good.

We are currently in the process of contacting all DXPC related
copyright holders mentioned in the NXCOMP license file [6]. We already
received some feedback from Kevin Vigor [7], but we also need to
address you (Brian, Zachary, Gian Filippo) with this. (The mail
address I have from Zachary may be outdated, so any current contact
address is highly welcome, in case the mail address being used will
bounce back).

At the moment, NXCOMP (and thus nx-libs, but also NoMachine's NXv3
code) cannot be considered as fully free software, until this issue is
settled. The DXPC license before DXPC v3.8.1 was an ancient BSD style
license that failed in explicitly mentioning, that it is allowed to
modify the DXPC code in derivative works. In 2002, DXPC 3.8.1 got
released [12], using a more compliant license (BSD-2-clause). As Kevin
told us, this license change [8,9] was done after the FSF [10] had
contacted the DXPC developers.

However, the NXCOMP code in NXv3 got forked from DXPC before 2002, as
it seems. So unfortunately, the modifications of DXPC as found in
NoMachine's NXCOMP product are not compliant with the pre-3.8.1
license of DXPC.

I think that now it would be useful to ascertain that the other copyright owners (Brian Pane, Zachary Vonler, Gian Filippo Pinzari) are also OK with this interpretation of the re-licensing operation.

TL;DR; So here comes my actual question: are you (Brian Pane, Zachary
Vonler, Gian Filippo Pinzari) ok with retroactively regarding
pre-3.8.1 code of DXPC (that you probably all worked on at that time)
as BSD-2-clause? Are you ok with others having taken or taking the
pre-3.8.1 DXPC code and distribute it in a modified form?

A yes from all of you as DXPC copyright holders is essential for the
continuation of nx-libs development under a free license. This may
also possibly be an issue for NXv4 in case parts of it have been
derived from DXPC.

Thanks to all of you for taking your time.

light+love Mike

[1.1] http://www.debian.org [1.2] https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=sunweaver%40debian.org [2] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs [3] https://www.debian.org/legal/ [4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=784565#5 [5] http://www.vigor.nu/dxpc/ [6] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/blob/3.6.x/nxcomp/LICENSE#L32 [7] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=784565#40 [8] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=72020 [9] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=142028 [10] http://www.fsf.org/ [11] https://www.nomachine.com/version-3 [12] http://www.vigor.nu/dxpc/CHANGES

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