[X2go-dev] NoMachine's licensing

[brian mullan]

I asked nomachine and here is their actual license.

As I'd suspected the GPL components that they use NoMachine points out were
GPL already
and nearly 80% of the overall NX project.

Given that I'm not sure they can copyright those modules as they were based
on other GPL projects... see URL:
http://www.nomachine.com/ar/view.php?ar_id=AR10B00018

Under the NoMachine EULA <http://www.nomachine.com/licensing> it limits
their copyright to the following programs:

*4.1 Commercial NoMachine Software

NoMachine Commercial Software consists of the following computer programs
that have been developed by NoMachine:

 - nxserver
 - nxnode
 - nxmanager
 - nxclient
 - nxapplet
 - nxstat

NoMachine owns the copyrights and intellectual property in and to each
item of NoMachine Commercial Software.*

The EULA also names all of the Open Source NoMachine programs separately
that remain open.

The URL that Erik provided says:

Note also that to maintain the code ununcumbered of copyright, patents and
licensing issues, it is required that you agree on giving to NoMachine a *Joint
Copyright Assignment, granting the right to use your contributions in future
NoMachine software, being this future software open or closed source and
intended for commercial or non commercial use*. Such a JCA is standard in
the industry, being required, for example, to contribute to Apache or to
some projects sponsored by the GNU FSF. While *NoMachine releases its OSS
software under the GPL license (a non-whitdrawable deal, ensuring that the
software you contributed will be freely available forever under the terms of
this same license*),* it is a requisite that NoMachine will maintain the
full copyright on the software it develop*s.

So any code anyone's contributed since 2004 to NoMachine's programs (see the
above list) just gives NoMachine JOINT copyright with the contributors.

There's only a question if any of x2go's current modules were directly
derived from NoMachine's above "programs":

libssh
nxcomp
nxcompext
xcompshad
nxproxy
x2goagent
x2goclient
x2gognomebindings
x2goplugin
x2goserver

Brian



*Article:  #AR10B00018*           Added on: 2004-10-04   Last Modified:
2011-01-12   Applies to: NX Licensing        *Under what kind of license is
NX distributed?*
NX Server and NX Client are commercial products, distributed under a closed
source licence <http://www.nomachine.com/licensing> but all the core
libraries (for example libraries implementing X protocol compression), the
modified X11 transport libraries (which implement proxying of any standard X
client) and the NX agent (the program that runs X sessions on behalf of the
user) are released under the GNU General Public Licence. They represent a
huge part of the project, currently nearly 80% of all the time and resources
dedicated to NX development. See our EULA for specific details:
http://www.nomachine.com/licensing
------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2011 09:50:13 +0100
From: Erik Auerswald <auerswald at fg-networking.de>
To: x2go-dev at lists.berlios.de
Subject: Re: [X2go-dev] [Pkg-x2go-devel] Getting things started with
       x2goclient
Message-ID: <20110202085013.GB24710 at fgnfs.fg-networking.de>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

Hi,

On Tue, Feb 01, 2011 at 01:53:27PM -0500, Gerry Reno wrote:
> On 02/01/2011 01:44 PM, Moritz Str?be wrote:
> > Am 01.02.2011 18:28, Gerry Reno schrieb:
> >
> >> Unless NoMachine completely rewrote the NX libs from scratch they
cannot
> >> change the license nor can they fail to provide any updates made to
that
> >> code base.  Once the GPL license is on a code base ALL derivatives that
> >> are distributed in any manner are covered under the GPL no matter who
> >> makes them.

Any code released under the GPL remains this way. This does not affect new
releases done by the copyright holder.

> > No, this only applies if you license the code. Therefore they can
> > re-license  the code under whatever license they wish, as long as they
> > don't violate the rights (licenses) of others.
>
> Without knowing the entire history of the NX codebase, I would say that
> if they were accepting contributions from any contributors that made
> their contributions under the GPL then they, NoMachine, cannot just
> summarily change the license of the codebase.

They have the copyright on all code in NX, see their contribution
guidelines:
http://www.nomachine.com/ar/view.php?ar_id=AR12B00113

To spell it out: Nomachine can relicense the NX code any which way they
want.

BTW this was the first google result for the query "contribute nomachine
nx", a few seconds research would have saved many emails...

Erik
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