Re: [ns] NS license

[Lloyd Wood <l.wood@eim.surrey.ac.uk>]

On Wed, 12 Dec 2001, John Heidemann wrote:

> I'd like to answer your question, but it's not completely clear to me
> what your question is.

Ben was responding to Valerie's original question in:
http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/archive/ns-users/webarch/2001/msg06089.html
(and included the full text of it in his reply).

> In general, we want ns to be widely used---it's used at public
> schools (like the UC system), private schools (like USC and U.
> Penn.).

but under what terms? Note that Valerie is asking a specific legal
question, coming from a legal background:

$ Especially, is it authorized to publish and market courses about how
$ to use NS ?

such courses presumably wouldn't be much use without a working copy of
ns...

The various licenses on the various source files are something of a
mess, as I've pointed out previously (last, back when I was worrying
about Nortel IPR claims affecting the Nortel diffserv code.)

tclAppInit.c refers to some file called license.terms in old tcl
distributions; no idea what version.

The Xerox license (on e.g. consrcvr.cc or realaudio.cc or the webcache
stuff) restricts use to research and evaluation (whatever that is),
which is the main immediate restriction as far as I can see. Since
teaching isn't research, that would presumably exclude use of ns for
teaching, in this layman's interpretation. But does all of ns inherit
the Xerox restriction?@

I see the diffusion3 code is under the GPL - does this mean that all
of ns is now under the GPL rather than the BSD license, since the GPL
is viral? (and won't that conflict with the Xerox license?) I note
that the GPL is not listed in COPYRIGHTS?rev=1.4, and I imagine there
are other licenses not listed there as well.

etc.

> There shouldn't be a problem using it in similar contexts for
> education at for-profit institutions like U. of Phoenix, although if
> you're concerned, please contact me directly.

Would I even be permitted by the minimum subset of rights allowed by
the intersection of all licenses to run ns within cisco? Does the
Xerox license permit use in teaching?

All valid questions.

L.

it's really spelt 'licence'.

<L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>