Replies: 9 comments 1 reply
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I talked with Christian Woltering before creating this repository, he gave me his explicit consent to share the C# port here on GitHub, he even exported / sent me the Documentation to share it somehow later on. Rights to use the original library should be asked from Jonathan Richard Shewchuk himself, I suppose. Let me know once you have any answer from Jonathan. |
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The unclear licensing situation was one reason for me not to move the project to Github. One might argue, that the original license is not very clear about how a derived work like Triangle.NET should be treated:
Copyright notice is given, so this shouldn't be a problem. But what about the license? What does MADE TO IT IN THE SAME FILE mean?
He explicitly talks about this code and not about derived work. Anyways, I've gotten a lot of requests regarding licensing of Triangle.NET over the years, and my advice was and is: if you want to use Trianlge.NET in a commercial product, try to get into contact with Mr Shewchuk. The problem with that is: from my experience, you won't get a reply. |
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@wo80 thank you for your post and explaining the situation from your POV. |
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FWIW I recently also tried to contact Jonathan Shewchuk but also didn't get a reply (after several weeks had gone by). Overall I had to conclude that it was too unclear a situation to use this code in a commercial product. |
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Would it be worthwile to ask Jonathan Shewchuk again about his intentions with the licensing? I think he made a great effort by publishing his original source code but the licensing seems a drawback for extending this project further (at least for using it in external packages). It doesn't look like the original project got any further in development. What do you think? |
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Yes.
I think you won't get a reply. The original C code is older than most of the open source licenses existing, so I guess at that time it was pretty common to come up with your own license - creating the issue we have here, 30 years later. The best (*) solution would probably be to have some kind of dual licensing: keeping the restrictions for commercial use and at the same time have an open source license for non-commercial use. But considering that the last official release is now 18 years old, I'm not sure if Jonathan Shewchuk has much interest in this. *) Edit: not best, but closest to what the original author intended |
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Unfortunately also no reaction so far. Status quo remains |
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Perhaps dragging this conversation sideways, but is there another triangulator you use in place of this due to the license confusion? |
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I have used https://github.com/nickgravelyn/Triangulator but this project now seems to be deleted on Github. It was (is?) MIT License. Its readme stated this:
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According to the readme file, this library is released under the MIT License. Among other things, the MIT License allows usage of the so-licensed code in commercial products.
However, the title page says that this library "is a C# port by Christian Woltering of Jonathan Shewchuk's Triangle software." As far as I understand, that usually implies the original author's copyright and licensing terms extend to the ported version. When I go to the website of Jonathan Shewchuk's Triangle library, the text there says: "Please note that although Triangle is freely available, it is copyrighted by the author and may not be sold or included in commercial products without a license." (emphasis by myself).
So, which one is it?
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