[Insight-users] ITK LICENSE CHANGE TO OSI-APPROVED BSD LICENSE: STARTING WITH ITK 3.6

[Luis Ibanez]

Hi Tom,


   This is a great question.

   Yes, we did a review of third party libraries a while ago at
   the request (and with the help) of the packager of ITK for
   Debian.

   You will find this described in the file:

           Insight/Copyright/README.txt


   This file was last updated on November 9th 2006.



   Note that you must distinguish between

          a) Libraries that ITK depends upon.

   and

          b) Libraries that ITK is compatible with


   For example,

       ITK depends on VXL.

       ITK is compatible with FFTW and MINC2
              but does not depend on them.


    ITK is already distributed with all
        the third party libraries that
        it depends upon. We have verified
        those libraries for being compatible
        with the BSD license.

        Of course, it is always possible
        that we may have missed to note
        something, so please let us know
        if you see anything suspicious.


   Regards,


       Luis



------------------------
Tom Vercauteren wrote:
> Hi Luis,
> 
> Thanks for the update on ITK's licence which is really great.
> 
> This reminded me of a small question I had with respect to third-party
> libraries. Is there a wiki, a web page, or something else that lists
> the licences of the third-party libraries that ITK uses or may use?
> 
> I first thought that ITK only depended on BSD-like libraries. Then I
> realized that FFTW is only GPL. So maybe I missed some other potential
> problems...
> 
> It would be nice to make sure that ITK users are aware at compile time
> that they introduce non-BSD-like dependencies (if they actually do
> so).
> 
> In ffmpeg for example, one needs to call "./configure --enable-gpl" in
> order to introduce GPL dependencies. In the case of ITK, there could
> be a CMake flag called for example "ENFORCE_BSD" that would among
> other explicitely set the USE_FFTW flags to false.
> 
> Let me know if I am not being clear here. Licence questions is not my
> speciality... I can also file a bug report if you feel it's necessary.
> 
> Best regards,
> Tom Vercauteren
> 
> P.S: The FFTW issue is all the more problematic that currently, the
> VNL alternative is broken:
> http://www.itk.org/Bug/view.php?id=6453
> It would thus also be nice if the patch proposed in the above bug
> report could be introduced in ITK 3.6 :)
>