Posted Jun 20, 2022, 11:05 AM UTC
Time to get a CeCILL-licensed Calculator then.
Dr. Michlmayr reported that he was approached by Patrick Moreau of INRIA after the Paris face to face with regards to the status of the CeCILL license. CeCILL is currently a free software license approved by the Free Software Foundation but it's not OSI-approved.
https://opensource.org/minutes20101103
The CeCILL is a free software license, explicitly compatible with the GNU GPL.
How can a license be GPL-compatible but not open source, since the GPL is open source?
Free software is not open source software, as in OSI and FSF definition.
There is a subtle ethical difference. I invite you to search about Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Open Source Initiative (OSI).
The first embrace the copyleft license and don't let you to fork a GPL (example) software into a proprietary product.
Another example is a software distributed with the source and a license that let you to study it (eg. for trust) but not to create a derivative software.
The list I posted isn't part of "the law", so there's no legal definition for open source (e.g.: approved by the OSI). It's just a document from the public body that manages national exams.
I know free software and open source aren't the same, but the GPL is both. What I'm really asking is this: if license X is open source, and license Y is compatible with license X, then how can license Y not be open source too?
It’s a good question. If I create and distribute software under a proprietary licence but with a clause saying “if you merge this software with GPL code, then you can treat the whole thing as licensed under GPL”, then it doesn’t fulfil the Open Source Definition because you can’t distribute it as open source software unless you merge it with the GPL code. It’s obviously trivially easy to work around this by writing a tiny bit of code, releasing that under GPL and then merging it with my hypothetical code. Of course, at that point there would be nothing preventing anyone from removing that tiny piece of GPL code, and releasing the result, which is identical to the original hypothetical code, under the GPL, at which point it would be open source, both because it’s under an OSI approved licence, and because it complies with the OSD. (My view is that if code is released under a licence which fulfils the OSD, it’s open source, even if the specific licence has not been approved by the OSI. Other people have differing views).
Technically even proprietary software can be GPL-compatible:
The Best Proprietary License
You may use this software for non-commercial purposes only.
The source-code of this software is available at https;//link.to.source/
You may not redistribute the unaltered binary or source-code.
You may add changes to the source-code.
If you want to distribute the modified source-code, whether with or without binary, you have to license it under the Best Proprietary License <https;//link.to.license>, or GPLv3 <https;//www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt>.
The FSF actually has an FAQ entry about that specifically: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ReleaseNotOriginal
The short explanation is that if you're actually allowed to distribute modified versions under the GPL, then the restriction on distributing unmodified versions is ineffective.
I don't get why they are responding with "No."
I mean, it would be ineffective, but that doesn't mean I can't do it.
If you try to block that path, by saying explicitly in the license that I'm not allowed to reproduce something identical to version A under the GPL by deleting those lines from version B, in effect the license now says that I can't fully use version B in all the ways that the GPL permits. In other words, the license does not in fact allow a user to release a modified version such as B under the GPL.
I think, the prohibition would only apply if you looked at the original source-code. If you stay willfully ignorant of it, a Version C that happened to be identical to Version A would be a Clean-room design.
You may use this software for non-commercial purposes only.
Wow, we're only at the first clause and it's already violating the GPL
Explicit permission to relicense to GPL defeats incompatibilities with GPL.
See another example: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#EUPL-1.1
Unfortunately the Portuguese government is full of clueless shit like this. I had to get an expensive as fuck Casio Calculator and it would allow me to cheat really easily via text files.
Some of my friends had a coloured TI that could open PDF files or even run Pokemon Crystal, which they played in class.
I'm not even sure if this type of requirement is even legal. Nowadays I work for a private company that mainly works for the state and they make lots of illegal requirements in their public contests. If they don't accept our application because of an illegal requirement, we will contest the decision and they will have to accept it.
It takes time though, and students won't obviously act against it, mainly because there may be clueless teachers who will support stupid shit like this.
i can play mario bros on my fucknig TI nspire from highschool which is why i keep it around lol
Looks like an unwarranted requirement from someone who doesn't know what they are talking about. There's no reason a FOSS calculator would be any more "unsafe", or whatever, than a proprietary one. In this scenario I could just fork a BSD or MIT licensed calculator and release it under a proprietary license myself, and then it would be okay, I suppose.
Just a garbage and non thought out requirement.
I would suggest two alternative reasons:
They can't be bothered to 'audit' FOSS software/hardware;
They're getting kickbacks from manufacturers/distributors/retailers selling 'authorized' devices.
Unlike in other coutries, the list is non-exaustive. Instead of saying "we accept these specific CASIO and these TI calculators", they say "we accept any calculator with these characteristics". Therefore, influence from manufacturers may be not as prevalent, but still a possibility.
I think they have the mentality "if it's open source students can hack it and use it to cheat", when you can, in fact, do that with all calculators.
To be fair, it makes sense. Open source is much easier to modify ("hack"), that's the whole point of free or open source. Was there maybe a scandal with these calculators? Can you search for that in Portuguese?
Not that I know of but they aren't very popular either (we mostly use the Casio prizm line). In my (small) high school (max 200 10th-12th students), there's only one girl with a numworks calculator.
I don't know why but even though it's open source, the numworks specifically in the list of example allowed calculators (facepalm).
Edit: numworks is only source-available, not open source. They changed the license after version 16 not to allow redistribution due to stupid policies like this one.
You could even release the code under the JSON licence or BSD-4-Clause which aren’t technically open source licences, but are (particularly JSON) for most practical purposes.